Students need far more than traditional academic skills to succeed in school, work and civic life. Decades of discussion about the knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviors that facilitate success in the information age have produced consensus that students should learn 21st century competencies. However, many schools struggle to meaningfully…

Based on the premise that instructional development is a change process and the instructional developer is a change agent, this chapter begins by considering the literature of planned change as applied to the process of instructional development. It is argued that instructional product evaluation must include both formative and summative…

This chapter discusses current methods of formative evaluation and suggests that these methods themselves need to be subjected to more critical research and evaluation in order to provide them with a more scientific base. Topics addressed include problems and methods associated with data gathering, evaluation designs, number of subjects available,…

This booklet is a reflection on a quarter century of successful leadership in a school that pioneered the nongraded learning environment and demonstrated the effectiveness of other innovations such as team teaching, elimination of tracking, long-term developmental objectives for each student, performance-based assessment, and cooperative learning.…

This chapter addresses the problems encountered in the formative evaluation of instructional development projects and the instructional development process. Three types of formative evaluation--component, convergent, and contextual--are distinguished, and the consequences of using the wrong type of evaluation in a particular situation or project…

Differences between curriculum-based assessment and curriculum-based measurement (CBM) are outlined, and a rationale for CBM's standardized, long-term goal approach to measurement is presented. CBM can be used to develop instructional programs in four ways, including judging the appropriateness of goals and contrasting the efficacy of different…

The founding policies of precision teaching are discussed: monitor frequency daily, use self-recording, use standard charts to display major changes, and accept that the child knows best how he or she learns. Contributions of teachers that have furthered the development of precision teaching are documented. (JDD)

Describes steps involved in preparing hierarchical charts for use in performance and instructional technologies. Thirteen examples are shown that deal with systematic instructional development, and guidelines for choosing the appropriate format are discussed, including content, audience, and resources. Evaluation procedures involving paired…

Sometimes an assessment program becomes well-established, nationally recognized, "proven" effective, and thus stuck in its routines and reasoning, becoming just another university bureaucracy for the teachers and students who work within it. The pedagogical question was how to keep an assessment program, or writing program for that…

Teachers are provided with a model and general recommendations for efficient and effective instructional planning. The model, a map, begins with an identification of the major concepts, skills, and attitudes to be taught. A graphic route is then charted for logical planning towards achieving these instructional objectives. Nine…

This booklet begins by examining the role played by evaluation in course and curriculum development, and then shows how the basic "error elimination" approach advocated by the philosopher Karl Popper can be used as a basis for the on-going evaluation of instructional systems. Next, two contrasting paradigms of evaluation are described,…

The use of curriculum-based assessment can provide teachers with useful data to plan instruction that is precise, relevant, and designed to help learning-disabled students succeed. Discussed are the steps in the assessment process, types of assessment instruments, and specific procedures for curriculum-based assessment in the language arts. (JDD)

This article describes a set of Preactive Decision Exercises (PreDEx) that can be used to evaluate teachers' planning abilities. The exercises present, through simulations, typical situations in which teachers must make planning decisions. The exercises were given to students entering a preservice teacher education program. (Author/PP)

Presents a systems model for developing instruction in the affective domain and offers a checklist for instructional design. Topics discussed include conducting a needs assessment; behavioral objectives; sequencing affective objectives; the relationship between affective and cognitive behaviors; selecting instructional procedures; and designing…

This article first discusses purposes for assessing mathematics performance, including comparison with peer performance, identifying mastered skills, and targeting mathematics strategies. It then explains a variety of assessment strategies, including teacher-made tests, checklists/rating scales, graphs of student performance, interviews, miscue…