Evidence and Decision Making illuminates the crucial roles that teachers, administrators, and other education professionals play in constructing and using evidence to make decisions that support learning. Authors analyze different practices of constructing and using evidence in classrooms, teacher communities, schools, and school districts; consider the roles that district, state, and federal education agencies can play in supporting sound practice; and provide historical contexts, theoretical resources for studying evidence use, and epistemological resources for warranting different types of decisions. The volume provides a realistic and complex vision of what counts as evidence and how evidence is or might be used to inform professional learning and decision making across levels of the educational system.
About the Author
Pamela Moss specializes in educational assessment, applied philosophy of social science (especially hermeneutics and critical theory), and interpretive or qualitative research practices. The courses she teaches in these areas are structured to enable students to appropriate the ideas they encounter into their own research and teaching agendas. Much of her research focuses on validity in educational assessment, especially the assessment of teaching. Her approach to the study of assessment engages the critical potential of work across disciplinary boundaries--examining one method or discourse of inquiry from the perspective of another--to illuminate taken-for-granted assumptions about validity and to trace their social effects. She is co-editor of the journal, Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives. She received her Ph.D. in educational measurement from the University of Pittsburgh in 1988 and has served on the faculty at the University of Michigan since 1989.
