Spring 2020 Newsletter
What’s New at the Center for Assessment, Design, Research and Evaluation
Greetings dear friends and colleagues!
We hope this newsletter finds you enjoying a happy and productive start to the new year. Here at CADRE, we are still riding the high we experienced from hosting the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) Special Conference on Classroom Assessment last September. We were pleased to welcome 288 people who traveled from 32 American states and 5 international countries to join us here in Boulder, CO. The conference featured keynote presentations from Deborah Ball, Lorrie Shepard, Margaret Heritage, Bill Penuel, Angela DeBarger, Erin Furtak, Megan Bang, and Kalehua Krug. The breakout sessions were equally thought-provoking. If you were there, we hope the ideas you experienced continue to resonate. If you missed it, you can find videos for the keynote presentations and slides from the breakout sessions here.
—Derek Briggs, CADRE Director
New Resource: Classroom Assessment Principles
An important product from the NCME Third Special Conference on Classroom Assessment conference is a set of classroom assessment principles intended to serve as a resource for school leaders and district and state policymakers. As conference organizers, we drafted these principles using input from our partners at the Aurora Public Schools, Cherry Creek School District, Colorado Department of Education, Denver Public Schools and the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. We then distributed the draft and solicited feedback from the broader group of conference participants, who represented a mix of educational researchers and practitioners, to finalize the principles. Impressively, 92 individuals (32 percent of conference participants) provided feedback.
We acknowledge that these principles are neither new nor exhaustive. They are intended to foster an equity-focused, learning-culture vision for classroom assessment by attending to the social context, communities, and needs of diverse learners. Understanding that teachers and students cannot engage in these classroom principles without accessing resources and supports from school and district leaders, we also provide several examples in the document to highlight what different groups can do to help support this vision. Our hope is that these principles can help inform ongoing efforts taking place at districts and schools to improve upon student learning and classroom practices. These principles were developed through the generous support of the Hewlett Foundation.
Latest Announcements
- Congratulations to CADRE Director Derek Briggs, who was recently elected as the President of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) effective 2021!
- We are now accepting nominations for the Robert L. Linn Memorial Lecture Award. This award recognizes a mid-career scholar who has made important and integrative contributions to the field of educational measurement. The deadline for nominations is February 28, 2020.
Project Profiles
- Colorado Department of Education Significant Disproportionality Policy Review: The IDEA Act requires states to examine data annually to determine if there is significant disproportionality based on race and ethnicity in multiple special education contexts. The CDE contracted CADRE (Jessica Alzen and Elena Diaz-Bilello) to serve as an external reviewer.
- Student Growth Study with Curriculum Associates: A core principle behind diagnostic assessment is that results are intended to provide teachers (and students) with timely and actionable information that can be used to inform subsequent instruction. This work will be spearheaded by CADRE Director Derek Briggs with assistance from Sarah Wellberg, a graduate student researcher.
- The Educational Opportunity Project: The Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), an initiative lead by Stanford University, is a publicly available database aimed at providing researchers, policymakers, educators, and parents with data about educational opportunity in the United States. Benjamin Shear and Kaitlin Mork helped develop statistical methods used to construct SEDA.
- School of Education Place-Based Research in Northeast Colorado: Benjamin Shear and Kaitlin Mork collaborated with School of Education colleagues Terri Wilson, Michele Moses , and Maravene Taylor-Heine on a School of Education place-based partnership research project exploring the impacts of state accountability systems on small, rural school districts.