Many states require student assessment data to be a significant portion of teachers’ annual evaluations. Yet educators in non-state-tested subjects struggle to acquire useful student performance data that authentically demonstrate their effectiveness.
Our researchers and developers work to expand our resource library with materials that support and guide districts in measuring and documenting student performance and educator practice, and in promoting educator evaluation as an opportunity to demonstrate effectiveness versus an opportunity to inspect practice and data for deficits.
Current Research and Development Topics
Performance assessment used in demonstrating educator effectiveness
We engage a wide community of arts educators to continue to study and improve the use of the Michigan Arts Education Instruction and Assessment (MAEIA) program’s catalog of curriculum-embedded performance assessments.
Use of these assessments not only permits teachers to measure student learning, but also to document their professional practice with measures deemed worthwhile, challenging, and engaging.
We also maintain an impressive library of research, recommendations, and resources to support and expand the use of performance assessment in demonstrating educator effectiveness.
MAEIA Institute: Educator Evaluation in the Arts
Through a collaboration with the Michigan Council of Arts and Cultural Affairs (MCACA), we are learning more about how arts educators and principals might work together to support and measure growth in the arts disciplines.
The Institute (launched August 7, 2018) in its first year it was a series of face-to-face and virtual events throughout the school year. Participating teams receive support in the use of performance assessments that advance student learning and empower arts teachers to demonstrate their effectiveness. Subsequent years have featured an all-virtual, asynchronous series of engagements that demonstrated how to use collaborative scoring to increase the validity and reliability of student assessment information to demonstrate growth.
Michigan Collaborative Scoring System (MI-CSS)
Major impediments to district use of performance or constructed-response assessments are lack of trust in teacher self-scored assessments (due to lack of scorer training) and the cost of central scoring. We’ve addressed these challenges by developing a virtual collaborative scoring system that equips trained teachers to score constructed response and performance assessment results for one another.
Our new online platform, the Michigan-Collaborative Scoring System (MI-CSS), powered by OSCAR Classroom, provides distributed scoring opportunities and makes the results defensible for use in educator evaluation. Although the software was created as part of a statewide project addressing assessment in the arts (Michigan Arts Education Instruction and Assessment-MAEIA), the implications transcend all curriculum areas.
To learn more about the MAC’s Research and Development work, please contact Ed Roeber at (517) 816-4520.
Our resource bank contains additional materials and resources to support educators in the effective use of assessment.