NCME Endowment Matching Challenge | November: Mark Wilson
Each month through the new year, an NCME Past President is matching member donations to the NCME Endowment, dollar for dollar, up to $500. The NCME Endowment is a permanent fund supporting measurement excellence and integrity for generations to come. Each participating Past President was asked to reflect briefly on one question: “What from your presidency do you hope will endure in perpetuity?” This month’s past president addresses this prompt below. To donate, click here.
SUBMITTED BY Mark Wilson, NCME PRESIDENT FROM 2016 TO 2017
In my NCME presidential address, and in the years following, I concentrated on urging NCME and its members to more centrally focus their efforts on what I see as the most important role for measurement in education. That is, directly improving learning where it happens in schools and classrooms, by measuring change in the abilities and/or affective aspects of the sorts of topics being taught primarily within schools, including pre-schools and colleges, but also, of course, elsewhere in life and in work.
In the school classroom context, this prime role of integrated systems of measurement is to inform the educator how much change has occurred as a result of those activities (i.e., curriculum and instructional events, etc.), and to lay the grounds for the next set of activities. An integrated system of measurement will foreground the interpretation of formative measurement results as well as enable linking to more formal summative results. This role is crucial for the success of the educational enterprise—without it, education is blind, its social products are unevaluable, and the usual conception of education as having an improvement purpose is simply unobservable. Thus, the use of measurement to assess change is its central purpose in the educational domain.
And, indeed, there is ample evidence that the use of measurements within a classroom setting is not only important for the success of educational programs, but there is also direct evidence that such use contributes to that success. In fact, in broad meta-analyses, it has been found to make the largest difference. It is important to note that these classroom assessments occur not just in a physical “classroom” but may also include distance learning and online learning contexts—the important characteristic that makes it classroom assessment is that the teacher in these situations is using assessment information to make diagnostic decisions about individual students and groups of students (the “micro” assessment context), and also using it for the planning of instruction (the “meso” assessment context).
Thus, this is my message for NCME and its members—get on the right side of this: focus more on classroom assessment, encourage the investment of NCME and other institutional players in educational measurement in it, recruit and train more students who will focus on classroom assessment, and, very specifically, participate in NCME’s Classroom Assessment Conference, and contribute to publications that feature this work, such as the Classroom Assessment section of the journal Educational Assessment.[1] Indeed NCME and its members are best suited to bring the strengths of measurement to bear on this important educational challenge.
Please donate to the NCME Endowment, the Fund for Measurement Excellence and Integrity, and help us keep on asking important questions like these, to make crucial and positive contributions to education for generations to come.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/heda20/30/2