Interesting study

The authors wanted to see if middle school teachers were informed of the standards at that time (1998-2000) and if they were, did they use them to design assessment items? What they discover... See More

The authors wanted to see if middle school teachers were informed of the standards at that time (1998-2000) and if they were, did they use them to design assessment items? What they discovered was that the teachers lacked training in how to develop higher-order thinking questions or application questions and fell back on content/fact related questioning as a form of assessment. There is at least two unsubstantiated claims (which may be because this is a summary of a longer article) but the article does a nice job of explaining terms and how the data was processed. The appendix with the information on assessment analysis used for 2061 was a very useful piece of information for anyone who is interested in doing active research. A review of this article, as many things done by the authors could easily be done by a classroom teacher, could be used to evaluate their own assessment practices. It might also be useful for pre-service teachers or an in-service on assessment.