Aimee Gillis

Professor Orr
CIED 1003
June 2, 2016
Google Scholar
Article 1
Title: Sounds Like Success: A Framework for Equitable Assessment
Author: Catherine Wissehr, Marcelle A. Siegel, Kristy Halverson
Year Published: 2008
In the United States, there are about 13 million school children that do not primarily
speak English as their first language. Because of this circumstance, there is a high demand that
assessments are developed that are fair and stimulating for English language learners. The issue
with having this development is that it takes time to develop these type of tests. Although the
students are the factor in this, teachers are not helping the situation as they are not prepared to
teach such a diverse set of students, which include English language learners. The McCes
framework is five principles that can help address these challenges that teachers are facing in a
diverse classroom setting. McCes is an acronym that explains the principles for equitable
assessment. This equity framework helps allow classroom assessments to be comprehensible,
challenging and supportive for ELLs.
The first principle is matching learning and instruction goals of the language and the
specific subject. This means that they need to integrate both the language demands of the original
assessment with the conceptual goals of the new version. Principle two focuses on the
comprehensible aspect of linguistics and culture. Both the native English speakers and English

language learners need written assessments to be readable and not extra work for the ELLs. The
way in which both groups of students can be reached is by summarizing the information using
bullet points, pictures and shortened sentences. Culture is not only based on who speaks English
as their first language, but also involves their personal background and experiences that they
have had. Teachers need to take sociocultural influences into consideration when developing
assessments to allow as much fairness as possible based on the students experiences. In
achieving this, teachers need to get to know their students personally and well enough to know
what they have been exposed to and what they havent been exposed to, to try and alleviate as
much biasness as possible. The third, fourth and fifth principles are challenge students to think
about difficult ideas, elicit student understanding and scaffold the use of language and support
student learning, respectively. Teachers need to maintain a standard in assessment and learning
that is academically challenging to all who are involved, and avoid simplifying questions for
English language learners. Elicit student understanding means that questions need to aid the
students understanding. If a question is too general, then a student might not refer to the
knowledge they have learned about a topic and lean towards their own opinion. Teachers need to
evaluate the questions and make sure they guide the students in the right direction and are not too
vague. The final principle uses the word scaffold, meaning that teachers need to support the
students to a point and then slowly allow the students to become more independent in developing
answers and using their knowledge. Teachers need to start off with sufficient amount of aid for
the students and then gradually eliminate the aid in order for the student to get quality assessment
that incorporates gradual independence.
Since there are high numbers of language minority students, especially in the science
classrooms, this equitable assessment is essential for creating great assessment opportunities for

all the students. These principles help the teachers provide fair assessments, to all learners, that
are rich, well structured, contextualized and meaningful in terms of the knowledge given to
them. Therefore, this framework allows for good structure and well roundedness in the learning
environment. Not only does this enable the teachers to reach all of their students needs and
standards but gives the students a better classroom learning setting. This assessment outline
should be implemented and incorporated in as many classrooms as possible as it will make the
learning situation different and valuable for all the students.

Article 2
Title: A Comparison of grant- funded outdoor classrooms in rural and nonrural Missouri school
Author: Catherine Wissehr
Year Published: 2009

Article 3
Title: Science Museums and Specialized Content Courses for Prospectivr Elementary Teachers:
Implications for Learning to Teach Science
Author: Catherine Wissehr, Deborah L. Hanuscin
Year Published: 2010