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Just as a schooner’s speed increases when its sails are set properly, alignment among the policy elements of an education system will strengthen that system and improve what the system is able to attain.

Norman Webb, a senior researcher with the National Institute for Science Education, uses this image to illustrate the importance of aligning the elements of systemic reform in mathematics and science education.

Among the states and school districts trying to boost student achievement in mathematics and science, some are seeking deep, lasting changes in how students learn these critical subjects. Improved student learning will be easier to attain if expectations and assessments are in agreement. Webb’s work aims to help these educators think more clearly about the concept of alignment and to examine what it means for expectations and assessments to be in agreement. "The major elements of the education system must work together to help students achieve at higher levels of mathematical and scientific understanding," Webb says. "If instruction and assessment are not aligned, the education system will be fragmented and ineffective." Alignment, or agreement, needs to occur across criteria and across grade levels.

Agreement across criteria

When educators look at alignment between expectations and assessments of student achievement, assessments should agree with expectations (i.e., content standards and curriculum frameworks) in their focus on developing students’ knowledge of mathematics and science. Specifically, expectations and assessments should share the following attributes:

• The same categories of content should appear in expectations and assessment. For example, for an assessment to agree with the National Science Education Standards, its content topics would include science as inquiry, physical science, life science, earth and space science, science and technology, science in personal and social perspectives, and the history and nature of science.
• Expectations and assessments should require students to know the same level of information, to be able to transfer this knowledge to different contexts, and to have the same prerequisite knowledge.
• Expectations and assessments should cover a comparable span of topics and ideas within categories.
• Expectations and assessments should agree on the underlying concepts of science and mathematics, and what it means to "know" these concepts.
• Expectations and assessments should give similar highlight to content topics, instructional activities, and tasks.
• When expectations include more than learning concepts, procedures, and their applications, such as molding student attitudes and beliefs about science and mathematics, assessments also should support that broader vision.

As students mature, their knowledge of mathematics and science grows. For expectations and assessments to be aligned, Webb says, they should agree on how students develop and how best to help them learn at different developmental stages. In addition, expectations and assessments should agree on the underlying concepts of mathematics and science and what it means to "know" these concepts. Aligned expectations and assessments describe and represent, in complementary fashion, how students link concepts and how their instructional experiences should be organized.

Equity and fairness

Expectations and assessments should demand equally high learning standards for all students, while providing fair means for all students to demonstrate the expected level of learning. Expectations and assessments will be better aligned and more equitable if multiple forms of assessment are used. Why? Because students’ ability to perform well on an assessment can depend on a number of factors in addition to their knowledge. These factors include students’ culture, social background, and experiences. "The challenge," Webb says, "is to develop and maintain an aligned system with a variety of means of assessment that function together to reflect accurately what students know and can do."

For the near future, Webb says, it may be difficult to gauge the alignment of expectations and assessments on equity and fairness. Consistently low scores on an assessment of a particular learning goal may be the result of many factors, including misplaced expectations, rather than poor instruction or students’ lack of effort. Students may be developmentally unprepared to attain a particular expectation without previous experiences, for example.

Implications for teaching

Expectations and assessments should send consistent messages to teachers about appropriate teaching and should strongly affect classroom practices. Judging the alignment of expectations and assessments therefore requires considering the likely implications for classroom practice. Meaningful analyses have been done, for example, by asking teachers how they interpret expectations and assessments and how their classroom practices fit with them.

The true benefit of alignment, Webb says, is what happens in the classroom. Educators are now paying increased attention to the importance of involving students in scientific inquiry, hands-on learning, and "authentic" instruction. Assessments that reflect a passive type of instruction would be less aligned with those expectations. Likewise, expectations that students should perform scientific inquiry through actively constructing ideas and explanations will lack full alignment with assessments that test only whether students have memorized canonical ideas and explanations. Such instances of lack of alignment may result in less positive influences upon classroom instruction.

Although expectations and assessments should seek to encourage high student performance, they also need to form the basis for a program that is realistic and manageable. Local policy elements must be in a form that teachers and administrators can use in a day-to-day setting. Also, the public must feel that these elements are credible and that they are aimed at getting students to learn important and useful mathematics and science content.

Educators should review alignment

When using these criteria to judge the alignment of a system’s expectations and assessments, one needs to maintain a sense of reality, Webb says. The available resources, the amount of time available, legislative mandates, and other factors will influence how well alignment can be realized.

In approaching reform, Webb says, the consideration of alignment cannot come too soon. And just as educators need to ensure alignment from the very beginning of a reform initiative, they also should review the alignment among major policy elements as new policies are instituted, new administrative rules are imposed, and system needs are changed.