Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Committee Chair

Doug Eury

Abstract

This dissertation was designed to examine and assess the effectiveness of the ClassScape formative assessment tool on the planning, implementation, and evaluation of instruction at a rural middle school in western North Carolina. The teachers had the ClassScape program for 3 years, but were not using the program to plan future instruction. The tools used for data collection revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the implementation of the program. It is essential that schools have ongoing formative assessment practices in order for students to be successful in the 21st Century.

This case study utilized the mixed methods approach in order to successfully collect and analyze the data to develop a correct conclusion so others can see the importance of using formative assessment correctly. In order to give the researcher an appropriate amount of data to determine the impact of the ClassScape program on the formative assessment process, the following data collection tools were utilized: teacher surveys, student surveys, teacher focus groups, a student focus group, and individual teacher interviews.

The results from this mixed methods case study indicate that teachers at the selected school were using the ClassScape assessment program as well as other methods of formative assessment to form future instruction. The teachers and students involved in the study, however, were not pleased with how the ClassScape assessment program was designed. Several barriers, including time, lack of computer availability, and the requirement to use several other technology programs hindered the level that ClassScape was utilized.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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