April 30 - May 3, 2002
The Spencer Foundation Meeting
The Idea of Testing: Expanding the Foundations of Educational Assessment
Meeting Organizers
Pamela Moss, University of Michigan
Diana Pullin, Boston College
James Gee, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Edward Haertel, Stanford University
Lauren Jones Young, Spencer Foundation
Tuesday, April 30
Charles Fries Room
7:00 p.m. Reception and Dinner
This is an informal opportunity for us to get acquainted with one another.
Wednesday, May 1
Everett Jackson I Room
8:30 a.m. Breakfast
9:00 a.m. Welcome: Lauren Jones Young, The Spencer Foundation
Introduction, Goals, and Overview of Meeting, and Discussion of Issues that Generated our Proposal: Meeting Organizers
9:30 a.m. Sharing Intellectual Perspectives and Preconceptions about Assessment
Participants will each be asked to take about 10 minutes: (a) to talk about the paper they included in the briefing book, focusing especially on how it illustrates the assumptions that underlie their work; and (b) to share preconceptions about conventional practice in assessment.
12:00 p.m. Lunch (Everett Jackson II Room)
1:00 p.m. Discussion of Knowing What Students Know (KWSK) (NRC, 2001)
This will be an open discussion of issues raised by KWSK, guided by the following questions: From your perspective, what kinds of questions does this document raise? What is your response to its explicit assumptions? What appear to be its tacit assumptions or presuppositions? What, do you imagine, might be the consequences of pursuing the path it illuminates? What productive questions or kinds of research does it encourage or foreclose? This will be an opportunity to begin to illuminate issues on which we might focus our attention.
4:00 p.m. Summarizing the Issues Raised by KWSK Discussion and Foreshadowing
Thursday's Dialogue
5:00 p.m. Adjourn
6:30 p.m. Depart for Dinner
7:00 p.m. Dinner
Thursday, May 2
Everett Jackson I Room
8:30 a.m. Breakfast
9:00 a.m. Exploring the Intersection between Our Intellectual Perspectives and
Assessment Practice
Participants will each have the opportunity to address the following questions: How do you see your work or that of others in your field illuminating the conceptualization, practice, and use of assessment? What alternatives or analogues to assessments based in psychometrics / cognitive science do you imagine might be developed? How might your work or that of others in your field critically examine the way assessments shape and are shaped by the social contexts in which they are produced and received? Participants may choose to make a brief, informal presentation and/or to contribute through responses to others' presentations.
12:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. Forging an Agenda
Following the morning's dialogue, we will use this time to articulate possible goals for collaborative work and ways to accomplish them, including discussion of the possibility of an edited book. We will consider what recommendations we might develop for dissemination based on the two planned meetings and whether a longer range agenda seems worthwhile to explore.
4:30 p.m. Taking Stock of Our Goals
5:00 p.m. Adjourn
6:30 p.m. Depart for Dinner
7:00 p.m. Dinner
Friday, May 3
Everett Jackson I Room
7:30 a.m. Breakfast
8:00 a.m. Critiquing the First Meeting/Planning the Second Meeting
This closing session will be guided by the following questions: What aspects of this first meeting made it more or less productive for you and why? What other research questions or practices should we consider? What do you want to see on an agenda for our second meeting? Are there one or two other people we should ask to join us? When should the meeting occur? What tasks need to be accomplished between now and then? What do we want to have accomplished by (or soon after) the close of the second meeting?
10:00 a.m. Adjourn
10:30 a.m. Shuttle Departs for Airport