AN INVESTIGATION OF TEACHER EDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT LITERACY

Chad Gotch

The U.S. educational system is saturated with data on student achievement and performance that drive high-stakes decisions such as student promotion/retention, graduation, and teacher, principal, and school evaluation. To have confidence in these decisions, we need a workforce that is literate in assessment data--where they come from, what they can and cannot tell us. Many assessment data that are made publicly available come from standardized tests. Investigations of assessment literacy have traditionally emphasized classroom assessment. While the skills typically associated with this form of assessment, such as aligning in-class assessment to learning objectives and developing reliable and trustworthy grading methods (e.g., via rubrics), are worthy of study and cultivation, with the increasing visibility of standardized test data and its integration in to instruction and evaluation, a particular competence, namely measurement literacy, needs to receive more scholarly attention. Measurement literacy, as defined in this dissertation, concerns the ability to understand and work with the results of standardized tests. This dissertation contains three manuscripts with the following purposes: 1) to provide a basis for establishing a collective memory in the area of empirical assessment literacy study, and to identify gaps and inefficiencies in attention through a systematic review of the literature, 2) to examine the internal structure of a measure of educational measurement self-efficacy via factor analysis, and 3) to gather response process data to evaluate the extent to which a measure of educational measurement knowledge can support valid inferences of teacher understanding of measurement concepts. Results of this effort show we need improvements in measuring assessment literacy and assembling a cohesive community of scholars to build knowledge on the subject. Tentative support for the educational measurement literacy instrument was found. Some items appeared to function well while others need revision for the instrument to provide the most robust evidence for inferences about teachers' levels of measurement literacy. Future research should continue to evaluate evidence for the measurement literacy instrument; gather baseline information about the levels, antecedents, and associations of measurement literacy in the teaching workforce; and use this information to design effective professional development and communications around student test performance.

AN INVESTIGATION OF TEACHER EDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT LITERACY

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