Assessment
How To Choose The Best Tools To Successfully Transition To Common Core
Here, a leading educator proposes a few questions that school leaders need to ask to ensure they’re locating and using the most innovative and appropriate tools for managing this sweeping transformation.
Machine Scoring of Essays Means Better Tests for Less
The ASAP Pricing Study, published today, addresses these cost questions. The paper concludes that, "In a higher quality assessment, human scoring of student essays can comprise over 60 percent of the total cost of the assessment. Automating this scoring process holds tremendous promise in making higher quality assessments affordable."
Testing: Why We Need More of It. Lots More.
Let’s give testing back the power to enrich and improve learning. And if the role if high-stakes testing is to ensure equity, let’s focus on making the tests equitable. Or are we too addicted to a simplistic view of tests, to causation/correlation fallacies, and to outdated metaphors of school to make abundant access to tests available to all students, parents, and teachers?
What Does Measuring Student Growth Look Like in Practice?
By: Kristin Moran. How do you know if a student is learning? Too often, we neglect this fundamental question in our ongoing debates about test scores, standards and student progress.
What is Performance Assessment?
Performance assessments are real-world scenarios that reflect the ambiguity of real-world challenges. They require higher-order thinking and problem solving. They are concluded with authentic performance. Projects are the most common performance assessment. The tools to support projects and track academic development are (slowly) getting better . Transparent evaluation criteria: the learning outcomes drive the creation of the task.
Expeditionary Assessment: PBL Lessons from Ron Berger
Expeditionary Learning (EL) is a network of project-based schools. Chief Academic Officer, Ron Berger, is a thoughtful advocate for better assessment. Check out his advice for better PBL....and his new book.
Knowing The Score: Actionable Assessment from Student Writing
The challenge is finding ways to obtain meaningful data from these types of performances, and much of my focus has been on automatically extracting information from students’ writing.
CTB Acuity Adds Performance Assessment & Instructional Resources
The Acuity diagnostic assessments is aligned to Common Core and was designed to be used 4 times a year. Tests can be easily modified by teachers or be aligned to a common pacing guide. Haley outlined two big advances on the Acuity platform this year--playlists and performance assessments.
14 Developments to Watch for in 2014
It's been a big year for innovations in learning. If 2012 was the year of the MOOC, 2013 was the year blended learning went mainstream--even schools that were just layering tabs on top of an obsolete model called it "blended." The following are 14 developments to watch for in 2014.
Why Measuring Student Growth Matters Now More than Ever
How can we ensure that teachers have the tools they need to be successful and that students are supported as learners?