EbaeAlignment
From LiteracyTentWiki
Alignment of What gets Taught, Learned, and Assessed
• “…an effective, evidence-based adult education system will result only from collaborative, good-faith efforts to align all components of the system -- what gets taught, what gets learned, and what gets assessed, along with all the ways we need to support quality instruction and assessment -- with what all the stakeholders agree are the most important goals for that system….how we define ‘achievement’ is at the very heart of the matter.” [Message 22, Part One]
• “….What is important for adults to achieve through their participation in our programs? What do adults need/want to know and be able to do in order to meet their goals in their important adult roles, goals for ‘right-now’ as well as for lifelong learning? In a well-aligned, evidence-based system, I think this ‘content’ question will lead naturally to the ‘assessment’ question: Once we agree on what is important to teach and learn, how will we appropriately measure learning of important content? (And, by the way, how will we support teachers in improving delivery of instruction focused on this important content?). Then we can look at currently available standardized tests, identify what content they do in fact measure, and decide how well that matches up with what content we think is important to measure. At that point we may be in a position to adopt currently available tests, and/or change them, and/or develop new ones, so that we end up with an assessment system that actually tells us what we want to know about adult achievement. I don't believe our current system works this way. I don't think it can -- because we are not working with a consensus about what is important. And since we don't have that consensus, we can't really address the question of whether currently ‘approved’ standardized tests adequately measure what we think is important. We think that each of these tests may give us valid and important information about some aspects of adult learning – ‘parts’ of what is important, but we know that the tests are based on different sets of assumptions about what is important, as opposed to broad agreement on what's important, so they do not give us the same information. So my concern about defining adult achievement -- and groups of adults, for that matter -- based on the scores from currently available standardized assessments is a concern about misalignment between what we believe is important and what we measure. Given this misalignment, how can we possibly hold learners, teachers and programs ‘accountable’ for the results?” [Message 22, Part One]
