A "crazy curriculum" is often found in the best schools where students pass the required tests and go on more engaging learning. Common features of this type of curriculum are as follows: project based, team based, use of basic skills in context, and use of presentations. (Contains 10 references.) (JOW)

The uses of a well-made standardized test are identified: as an assessment tool to help students identify their strengths, to improve learning programs, to help colleges select students, to gauge the learning of academic skills, and as an early warning system. (MLW)

Standardized tests are merely a place to begin evaluation. As an alternative, criterion-referenced measures offer more specific information. The end point of assessment must involve diagnostic teaching and continuous evaluation of real-life task and setting modifications. (Author/CP)

Author Lyn Lesch advocates that learning cannot be measured by empirical results like testing and grading. As the founder of Chicago's The Children's School, Lesch didn't give grades or submit students to standardized testing. Such conditions may seem blasphemous to most educators, but the results spoke for themselves. Without the high-stakes…

Claims that each educator must discover the potentials of the learner and build on the individual's specific assortment of strengths. Presents Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, with practical implications, emphasizing that the intelligences are integrated at the application level by activities and remain separate only at the…

In an effort to examine issues raised by the effort to assess the performance of educational institutions, a project focusing on the social purposes and intellectual foundations of assessment practices in education was initiated. The primary goal of the project was to explore the possibility of developing new, more appropriate educational…