Presentation
PISA for teachers: interpreting and using information from an international reading assessment in the classroom
2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences
Start Date
17-8-2009 3:00 PM
End Date
17-8-2009 4:00 PM
Comments
A frequent objection to large-scale
testing programs, both national and
international, is that they are used as
an instrument of control, rather than
as a means of providing information
to effect change. Moreover, concerns
about large-scale testing often take
the form of objection to the specific
characteristics of the assessments as
being prescriptive and proscriptive,
leading to a narrowing of the
curriculum and the spectre of ‘teaching
to the test’ to the exclusion of more
important educational content. Taking
PISA reading literacy as its focus, this
presentation proposes, on the contrary,
that a coherent assessment system is
valuable in so far as it makes ‘teaching
to the test’ a virtue. With framework,
instrument and interpretation
transparently connected into a coherent
assessment system, the test itself
represents something that recognisably
ought to be taught, and its framework
and the interpretation of its results are
tools that can be used to improve the
teaching of reading.
Citation Information
Juliette Mendelovits and Dara Searle. "PISA for teachers: interpreting and using information from an international reading assessment in the classroom" (2009) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/juliette_mendelovits/3/