Fragile Evidence

Reviews / Votes

"This text, written for graduate or senior undergraduate students in educational assessment courses, is a most thought-provoking and useful supplementary text....This book does achieve its goal of forcefully challenging assumptions about how we assess reading. It forces us to look at the disquieting consequences of norm-referenced standardized tests and should encourage evaluators and educators to broaden their perspectives to include new means of assessing children's reading. Finally it should encourage psychologists to recognize that all evidence is 'fragile,' which in turn emphasizes their weighty role of assessors and interpreters."
-Contemporary Psychology

"Sharon Murphy and her co-authors offer a dose of healthy scepticism regarding the extent to which any standardised test intending to assess reading can achieve what it purports to do....anyone committed to the study of teaching reading should persevere with this book in order to benefit from much that it contains."
-Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice

"Clearly one of the most important minds the field of curriculum has known, Dwayne Huebner may well be judged by future historians of the field as the most important....And after you have studied what follows, I think you will agree."
---William F. Pinar
From the Introduction

social scientists to explore the arena of schools and issues that await there....A third layer of concern is a re-evaluation of standardized testing itself....Perhaps the most valuable part of the contextual puzzle these authors bring is their view of the real value of assessment. Where once this seemed to be a given, the authors have added a critical piece....Their argument, clearly delineated, is that we must examine the consequences of assessment for each child, for the population group or school, and decide what the assessment will mean in terms of life outcomes."
-Sally M. Oran
Northern Arizona University