A Road Map for Improving Geography Assessment

In late 2012, both the second edition of the "Geography for Life: National Geography Standards" and the National Science Foundation-funded "Road Map for Geography Education Project" reports were released; the former document describes the conceptual goals for K-12 geography education, and the latter, a route to coordinating reform efforts to realize those goals. A central premise of the Road Map Project reports is that reform must be implemented comprehensively across each facet of education. This will require a more robust foundation of research about teaching and learning around the geography learning objectives, developing high-quality instructional materials that move students toward those goals, preparing geography teachers to facilitate learning them, and creating assessments that validly and reliably assess them. The Road Map Project assessment report describes a process for creating assessments, from describing best practices for design and use of assessments, to describing a system for articulating what should be assessed, and how it should be assessed. In this article, the authors highlight five central components of the report, including: (1) areas identified as high priorities for geography assessments; (2) a clarification of the goals to be assessed; (3) an examination of how well existing assessments meet those goals; (4) a framework for creating a new generation of assessments that can support reform efforts; and (5) recommendations for where efforts should be focused to implement these changes. (Contains 2 figures and 1 footnote.)