Coming to terms with classroom assessment

Well-trained and informed classroom teachers have been intro-ducing modern classroom assessment approaches into their class-rooms. Performance-based assessment is now commonplace in many classrooms as more teachers become concerned about the authenticity of their assessments and how assessment informa-tion can be used as formative feedback to improve teaching and learning. Although these newer approaches are driven by a moti-vation to make student assessment data more useful and mean-ingful than some traditional approaches, and their use, therefore, is a positive development, it is hard to judge the theoretical ben-efit of these changes or even to begin to systematically explore the nature of teachers ’ modern classroom assessment practices. This difficulty arises because researchers, advocates, and practi-tioners have not arrived at a consistent definition of what these terms mean or what these practices look like. At recent meetings of the American Educational Research Association, classroom assessment researchers bemoaned a per-ceived lack of consensus as to the correct basic definitions for key classroom assessment terms. Marion (2005), Noonan and Duncan (2005), and Shepard (2005) argued, in different con-texts, that one limitation in conducting research about classroom assessment is that certain key terms are used in different ways at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on March 4, 2016joa.sagepub.comDownloaded fro