Professional development program on formative assessment shows no effect on 4th and 5th grade math

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REL Central conducted a randomized controlled trial in Colorado to test the impact of a teacher professional development program in formative assessment on students’ mathematics achievement.

Classroom Assessment for Student Learning (CASL) is a widely used professional development program on formative and classroom assessment. The program is designed to be self-executing, without a coach or external facilitator using a facilitation handbook, CASL textbooks, DVD sets, and ancillary books. The developers recommend implementing CASL using teacher learning teams, in which teachers meet regularly to discuss and reflect on the content of the program provided in the textbook and DVDs and share their experiences applying the program practices and principles in their classrooms. Although the program emphasizes formative assessment, it also addresses other types of assessment, including helping teachers understand standardized tests and how to use them productively in the classroom. The comparison condition consisted of regular instructional practice and regularly scheduled professional development activities in comparison schools

The study, Classroom Assessment for Student Learning: Impact on Elementary School Mathematics in the Central Region, did not find a statistically significant impact of Classroom Assessment for Student Learning (CASL) on the school-level average mathematics achievement of grade 4 and grade 5 students.

This study of CASL included 67 schools, 409 grade 4 and 5 teachers, and 9,596 students from 32 school districts in Colorado.

Other findings include:

• Many participating teachers did not complete the program as the developers had recommended. Most intervention teachers (67.18 percent) in this study reported learning team experiences that met the CASL developers’ criteria, such as developing operating principles and a common goal, but less than half (41.55 percent) reported at least partially reading each CASL textbook chapter. Teachers reported spending, on average, 31.21 hours on CASL activities, compared with the 60 hours recommended by the developer. Because the criteria were based on developer recommendations rather than empirical studies of program implementation, it is not possible to conclude that the teachers in this study spent less (or more) time on CASL than is customary in program implementation.

• CASL did not have a statistically significant impact on student motivation to learn, as measured by an adapted student motivation survey.

• CASL group teachers scored higher on a 60-item knowledge test that covered generally accepted principles of classroom assessment, by a statistically significant margin than did teachers assigned to the control group. CASL did not have a statistically significant impact at the school level on assessment practice or involvement of students in activities related to classroom assessment, such as discussing the learning objectives, evaluating their own work using scoring guides or rubrics, and revising work to correct errors.