Assessment serves many purposes in the elementary classroom. Formative assessment, often called assessment for learning, is characterized by its primary purpose--promoting learning. It takes place both formally and informally, is embedded in various stages of an instructional cycle, informs the teacher about appropriate next steps for instruction,…

Using "error bars" on graphs is a good way to help students see that, within the inherent uncertainty of the measurements due to the instruments used for measurement, the data points do, in fact, lie along the line that represents the linear relationship. In this article, the author explains why connecting the dots on graphs of collected data is…