Tag: formative assessment
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Formative Assessment
Read MoreWhat It Is and What Classroom & Schoolwide Practices Ensure Its Success For the next three blogs I am going to focus on formative assessment. Why this focus? Simple. A significant body of research has concluded that student-learning gains garnered by classroom formative assessment practices were among the largest ever reported for educational interventions (e.g., Black […]
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Three Levels of Assessment
Read MoreQuestions to Ask at Each In the previous Blog, I attempted to go inside the classroom and look at using assessment practices that promote student learning—assessment for learning. I’d like to take a step back and look at the balanced assessment system, this time at the three levels of assessment, the information about student learning […]
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Knowing What Students Know
Read MoreUsing Assessment to Improve Student Learning and Enhance Classroom Instruction In the previous Blog, I talked about creating and sustaining a balanced assessment system—i.e., different ways to assess, balancing assessment types, and conditions and practices that need to be in place in order to implement and sustain a balanced assessment system. This week, I want […]
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A Balanced Assessment System
Read MoreCreating, Implementing, and Sustaining Effective Assessment Practices As a society, we’ve shifted the thinking about schools from places where it’s OK for some students to succeed and some to fail to places where the expectation is for all students to succeed. With this shift, the role of assessment has changed from separating successful and unsuccessful students to […]
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Professional Development
Read MoreCreating & Sustaining Effective Classroom Assessment Practices If you are trying to decide where to send your child to school, your best bet might be to focus on which teacher(s) your child gets rather than on which school. Why? The vast majority of studies that have examined the classroom teacher’s impact on student learning have come […]
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Writing Short-Answer Items in Naiku
Read MoreThis week’s class focuses on the topic of item writing. All assessment items can be categorized either as a selected-response or a constructed-response item. I will be going over the advantages and disadvantages of each of the item type (i.e., true-false, multiple-choice, matching, short-answer, and essay items) in my class. For this blog, I want to […]
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Reliability Concerns for Classroom Formative Assessment
Read MoreThis week, I started teaching a course called Assessment: Theory and Practice to graduate students in the Leadership program at Saint Mary’s University. More than 70% of the students in the class are K-12 teachers. In a course like this, reliability and validity are of course big topics. In fact, next week’s class (5 hours […]
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How Item Statistics Can Help Your Formative Assessment Practice
Read MoreWhen I worked as a psychometrician for large testing companies, I would always conduct an item analysis on the test questions to ensure that they were good and reliable. And when I often met with teacher groups to explain and discuss their statewide accountability test results, the teachers would always ask for the item analysis […]
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The Testing Effect
Read MoreWe all knew that learning is not a passive mechanism – the learner (i.e., the student) must be an active participant in the process. But who knew that taking a test is also not a passive mechanism for assessing how much students know? Cognitive psychologists (learning and memory experts) knew, and they have been studying […]