Designing Effective Assessments


Book Description

Assessment is a critical component of effective teaching and learning. To gain valuable assessment data and make effective use of them, educators must have the right tools in place to create quality assessments. Designed specifically for K-12 educators, this title presents ten key assessment design tools and clearly outlines how to incorporate each tool into daily classroom practices. With quality assessment processes in place, teachers at all grade levels can accurately measure student mastery and shape instruction to increase achievement. Benefits Gain student learning data and help students visualize their own learning progress. Explore the benefits of involving students in the assessment process. Learn how to align grading policies and practices to ensure they are valid and reliable. Examine how standards-based grading and reporting communicate student learning better than traditional assessment practices. Consider how to teach students test-taking skills, which help students perform well and demonstrate their real level of achievement on assessments. Use reproducible handouts to create your own effective assessment and feedback practices. Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Enhancing Validity and Reliability of Assessments Chapter 2: Measuring Students' Attitudes, Dispositions, and Engagement Using Affective Assessment Chapter 3: Assessing Student Criterion-Referenced Learning Using Performance-Based Assessment Chapter 4: Documenting Student Progress through Portfolios Chapter 5: Creating Rubrics for Student Feedback Chapter 6: Building Practical Grading Practices Chapter 7: Building Valid and Reliable Grading Practices Chapter 8: Improving Communication through Standards-Based Grading Chapter 9: Understanding and Using Standardized Assessment Data Chapter 10: Teaching Test-Taking Skills References & Resources Index The free JavaScript formatter will handle dirty JS codes.




Assessing Student Learning by Design


Book Description

"How might we might help teachers use classroom assessments to gather appropriate evidence for all valued learning goals? How might our classroom assessments serve to promote learning, not just measure it? This book addresses these questions by offering a practical and proven Assessment Planning Framework. The Framework examines four different types of learning goals, considers various purposes and audiences for assessment, reviews five categories of assessment methods, and presents options for communicating results. This updated edition addresses the assessment of academic standards as well as transdisciplinary outcomes (e.g., 21st century skills), and describes the principles and practices underlying standards-based grading"--




Understanding by Design


Book Description

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.




Formative Assessment & Standards-Based Grading


Book Description

Learn everything you need to know to implement an integrated system of assessment and grading. The author details the specific benefits of formative assessment and explains how to design and interpret three different types of formative assessments, how to track student progress, and how to assign meaningful grades. Detailed examples bring each concept to life, and chapter exercises reinforce the content.




Designing Effective Assessment


Book Description

Fifteen years ago Trudy Banta and her colleagues surveyed the national landscape for the campus examples that were published in the classic work Assessment in Practice. Since then, significant advances have occurred, including the use of technology to organize and manage the assessment process and increased reliance on assessment findings to make key decisions aimed at enhancing student learning. Trudy Banta, Elizabeth Jones, and Karen Black offer 49 detailed current examples of good practice in planning, implementing, and sustaining assessment that are practical and ready to apply in new settings. This important resource can help educators put in place an effective process for determining what works and which improvements will have the most impact in improving curriculum, methods of instruction, and student services on college and university campuses.




Performance Assessments for Adult Education


Book Description

In the United States, the nomenclature of adult education includes adult literacy, adult secondary education, and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) services provided to undereducated and limited English proficient adults. Those receiving adult education services have diverse reasons for seeking additional education. With the passage of the WIA, the assessment of adult education students became mandatory-regardless of their reasons for seeking services. The law does allow the states and local programs flexibility in selecting the most appropriate assessment for the student. The purpose of the NRC's workshop was to explore issues related to efforts to measure learning gains in adult basic education programs, with a focus on performance-based assessments.




Knowing What Students Know


Book Description

Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.




Teacher-Made Assessments


Book Description

Assessment is not only a measure of student learning, but a means to student learning. This bestselling book guides you in constructing and using your own classroom assessments, including tests, quizzes, essays, and rubrics to improve student achievement. You will learn how to weave together curriculum, instruction, and learning to make assessment a more natural, useful part of teaching. Find out how to... ensure your assessments are fair, reliable, and valid; construct assessments that meet the level of cognitive demand expected of students; create select-response items and understand technology-enhanced items that are increasingly being used on assessments; use constructed-response items and develop scoring criteria such as rubrics; and analyze student results on assessments and use feedback more effectively. This second edition features updated examples that reflect the Common Core State Standards as well as other content standards and new, useful samples of teacher-friendly techniques for strengthening classroom assessment practices. No matter what grade level or subject area you teach, this practical book will become your go-to resource for designing effective assessments.




How Learning Works


Book Description

Praise for How Learning Works "How Learning Works is the perfect title for this excellent book. Drawing upon new research in psychology, education, and cognitive science, the authors have demystified a complex topic into clear explanations of seven powerful learning principles. Full of great ideas and practical suggestions, all based on solid research evidence, this book is essential reading for instructors at all levels who wish to improve their students' learning." —Barbara Gross Davis, assistant vice chancellor for educational development, University of California, Berkeley, and author, Tools for Teaching "This book is a must-read for every instructor, new or experienced. Although I have been teaching for almost thirty years, as I read this book I found myself resonating with many of its ideas, and I discovered new ways of thinking about teaching." —Eugenia T. Paulus, professor of chemistry, North Hennepin Community College, and 2008 U.S. Community Colleges Professor of the Year from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education "Thank you Carnegie Mellon for making accessible what has previously been inaccessible to those of us who are not learning scientists. Your focus on the essence of learning combined with concrete examples of the daily challenges of teaching and clear tactical strategies for faculty to consider is a welcome work. I will recommend this book to all my colleagues." —Catherine M. Casserly, senior partner, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching "As you read about each of the seven basic learning principles in this book, you will find advice that is grounded in learning theory, based on research evidence, relevant to college teaching, and easy to understand. The authors have extensive knowledge and experience in applying the science of learning to college teaching, and they graciously share it with you in this organized and readable book." —From the Foreword by Richard E. Mayer, professor of psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara; coauthor, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction; and author, Multimedia Learning




Designing Effective Assessments


Book Description

This publication presents the findings of a workshop co-organised by the Global Environmental Assessment Project and the European Environment Agency in March 2001, in order to discuss how environmental assessments can be conducted more effectively. The workshop focused on three key themes of: participation in the assessment process; science and governance issues, relating to how assessments are conducted and the interactions between scientific experts and policy makers; and decisions relating to the scope of the assessment process.