Leslie Nabors Oláh
Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE)
Graduate School of Education/University of Pennsylvania

Using interim assessments to raise student achievement depends on teacher use of assessment results, yet few studies have focused on the role of the teacher in this process. Of these, even fewer have observed teachers’ instruction as they respond to assessment results. This paper addresses the question: How do teachers in these two districts administer the interim assessment, analyze results, and modify instruction? Our findings are based on analysis of three rounds of 45 teacher interviews and classroom observations as well as teacher and curriculum artifacts from one urban and one suburban district in one state in the United States. This investigation is part of a larger CPRE study of the use of interim assessments in these two sites. 

We found that all of our teachers in both districts regularly accessed assessment results using an Instructional Management System. Across the districts teachers analyzed results in similar ways: first identifying the lowest-performing students and generally weak content areas (e.g., operations with fractions, place value, etc.). Teachers in both districts often spoke about these content areas in relationship with the state standards. They also frequently scrutinized the actual assessment items, occasionally identifying items that they felt did not accurately assess student learning. Teachers in the two districts began to diverge, however, in their instructional planning based on the interim assessment results. Teachers in the urban district tended to focus on meeting the needs of the lowest-performing students, while teachers in the suburban district were more likely to follow their district’s emphasis on “flex grouping” in which all students are grouped according to their needs in various content sub-domains. This practice was enabled by the presence of support staff, while in the urban district, flex grouping was seen as a classroom management challenge due to large class size and minimal in-class support.

Implications for designing and implementing professional development will be discussed, including the roles that assessment literacy, content knowledge and familiarity with the curriculum play at all levels of the system. Learning from these lessons, we are currently designing an instructional and assessment intervention for elementary mathematics that is will be tested in two urban schools.