The New Art and Science of Classroom Assessment. Robert J. Marzano
being one of those. In a system that uses proficiency scales as a measurement tool, one might lose the ability to generalize across a content area using a single test but gain immense clarity in particular slices of the target domain (for example, fifth-grade science).
The Assessment Focus of Standards
Clearly, it is the case that standards statements as currently written are not effective vehicles to drive classroom assessment. We recommend that educators rewrite standards statements so they provide a clear and unequivocal focus for classroom assessments. We call these rewritten standards statements focus statements. Focus statements translate into measurement topics. As the name implies, these measurement topics are considered important enough to assess multiple times at the school level or district level in an effort to determine the most accurate scores for individual students. To illustrate, we present figure 1.3.
Source for standards: Adapted from McREL, 2014a.
Figure 1.3: Standards with focus statements.
The focus statements in figure 1.3 contain the essence of the content in the full standards statement with enough detail to provide guidance for assessment, but not so much as to add unnecessary complexity. As we demonstrate in chapter 2, proficiency scales add even more detail, but focus statements are a useful step in the process of identifying critical content. As we indicate in the last column of figure 1.3, once educators articulate focus statements, it is easy to translate them into measurement topics.
The wording of the focus statements in figure 1.3 highlights the type of knowledge they represent. Those that begin with the word knows or understands are examples of declarative knowledge. Those that begin with the word executes are examples of procedural knowledge. It is important to note that we did this to make a point—namely, that the content embedded in standards statements comes in two different forms—declarative and procedural knowledge. We believe this distinction is critical simply because assessments should reflect the type of knowledge on which they focus. We describe how to do this in chapter 3 (page 43).
For now, suffice it to say that different subject areas have differing proportions of declarative and procedural knowledge. To illustrate, we consider a McREL (2014b) study in which researchers analyze the standards in fourteen different subject areas and determine the distributions of declarative and procedural knowledge in those subject areas. They updated their analysis in 2008, producing the results we depict in table 1.1.
Table 1.1: Standards Relating to Percentages of Declarative Versus Procedural Knowledge
| Subject | Declarative | Procedural |
| Mathematics | 139 | 84 |
| ELA | 86 | 254 |
| Science | 253 | 8 |
| History | 1,240 | 41 |
| Geography | 230 | 8 |
| Arts | 147 | 122 |
| Civics | 426 | 1 |
| Economics | 159 | 0 |
| Foreign Language | 52 | 56 |
| Health | 121 | 15 |
| Physical Education | 47 | 58 |
| Behavioral Studies | 100 | 0 |
| Technology | 106 | 38 |
| Life Skills | 67 | 241 |
| Total | 3,173 (77.41 percent) | 926 (22.59 percent) |
Note: Procedural and contextual have been combined.Source: McREL, 2014b.
Notice that, in general, there are far more declarative standards than procedural standards. More specifically, 77 percent of the standards in this study involve declarative content, and 23 percent involve procedural content. That noted, there is some significant variation from subject area to subject area. For example, physical education, life skills, arts, and foreign language are about equal in terms of their distribution of declarative and procedural content, whereas behavioral studies and economics have no procedural content.
A Small List of Measurement Topics
Ultimately, the purpose of analyzing and restating standards is to identify a relatively small set of measurement topics as the subject of classroom assessment and instruction. This list constitutes the assessment-friendly curriculum that is essential for a new paradigm of classroom assessment.
Developing the assessment-friendly curriculum is somewhat of a value-driven decision, but research guidance does exist. Specifically, Simms (2016) finds that if one removes the redundancy in standards and considers only those that national assessments typically contain, then the list of essential measurement topics is quite small. Table 1.2 reports the number of essential topics in mathematics, science, and ELA.
Table 1.2: Essential Topics in Mathematics, Science, and ELA
Source: Simms, 2016.
The list of essential measurement topics is available in The Critical Concepts (Simms, 2016). Educators can use this list as a starting place as they translate their local or state standards into measurement topics. As we indicate in table 1.2, there are a relatively small number of measurement topics at each grade level or grade-level span. For example, consider fifth grade. There are fourteen essential measurement topics in mathematics, ten in science, and fifteen in ELA. Contrast this with the seventy-three topics from the Common Core State Standards for ELA at the eighth-grade level, which we discussed previously.
Narrowing down all the content in state and national standards into a small set means that the measurement topics will not include all content. What, then, do we do with all this leftover content? There are two basic approaches to answering