Well, that’s a bad title. I mean, I know what the purpose of educational measurement is. It is to report on status of test takers’ proficiency with particular knowledge, skills and/or abilities (i.e., KSAs), and perhaps to report on improvements in their proficiencies (i.e., learning).
And it is to do so in quantitative terms. Not all educational assessment is about quantification, but educational measurement is. I accept that.
So, what I am really wondering about is the scholarly, academic and researchy field of educational measurement. This field includes professors and others at universities, vast numbers of professionals working in industry (i.e., in both for-profit and non-profit organization), folks working in government departments of education (i.e., local, state and federal), and even solo practitioners (like me).
I am asking about the researchy stuff. I am asking about the purpose and goals in advancing the field of educational measurement. This is the stuff of academic journals and a variety of types of conferences. No, this is not the every day work of teaching or developing tests. Rather, this is the most creative and intellectual part of the field, where the state of the art gets created and pushed further. Where the field learns, grows and advances.
What is the learning and growth oriented towards. What is its purpose? It’s a somewhat large field, so I suppose that there can be a lot of goals, depending on the particular interests of the researcher and grant makers.
So, let me come at this from another direction.
Since the original edition of the handbook Educational Measurement (Lindquist, 1951), we have seen huge advances around the world in educational attainment and equity. Simply vast. In the United States we have seen an incredible lowering of the drop out rate, even as we have created state standards and even raised those standards.
I am not questioning the contributions of educational measurement to those advances, at least not today. Rather, I ask whether the advances in educational measurement in the last 70 years have been important to those incredible advances in education rates around the world?
If they have, I would love to know how. And if they have not, which I strongly suspect is the case, why not? What have 70 years of advances in the field of educational measurement been for, if not improving education for students, for communities and for nations?
I would really like to know.