What Multiple Measures Aren't

The November issue of the Educational Leadership magazine focuses on multiple measures. One article I found particularly interesting is “The Many Meanings of Multiple Measures,” by Susan M. Brookhart.

I hear lots of people from across the ideological spectrum calling for multiple measures of student achievement. However, not everyone means the same thing. As Brookhart points out, language in No Child Left Behind (carried over from Title I of the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act) requires the use of multiple measures to determine school performance:

Such assessments shall involve multiple up-to-date measures of student academic achievement, including measures that assess higher-order thinking skills and understanding.

NCLB 2004 guidelines, though, count anything that measures higher-order thinking as multiple measures. I don’t think that is what was intended. And, according to Brookhart, some states simply count more than one opportunity to pass the state test as a multiple measure. I’ve also heard talk about benchmark assessments as multiple measures and while, yes, benchmark assessments can help teachers identify concepts in which students are struggling so they can reteach for better understanding, they are still really just one type of assessment given multiple times over the course of the school year.

That’s not my view of what multiple measures should look like. The types of measures referenced above do not provide a complete picture of a student’s understanding and progress in a given subject. I believe that true multiple measures to gauge student learning should include the state standardized test as well as a state-controlled system that includes perhaps observations, locally-created tests, structured reviews of student work, and other classroom projects and presentations wherein students illustrate their knowledge on a particular content area.

Why are multiple measures necessary? Brookhart points to the complete picture of student learning as one rationale: “several measures, taken together, are likely to more adequately sample the things students should know and be able to do in the achievement domain being measured.” She mentions another reason as being decision validity, meaning when schools make decisions about a child’s future – such as placement in advanced courses or special education – it is important to base those decisions on more than a single measure. Therefore to retain a child or keep a student from graduating just because they didn’t pass a single measure not only makes little sense but it is also unfair.

Brookhart details the various definitions of multiple measures and the ways they can be used and combined. Whatever the system looks like, I believe that it is critically important for policies that incentivize multiple measures that can provide a full picture of student learning and school progress to be established.