Eliciting, responding to, and advancing students' mathematical thinking all lie at the heart of great teaching. In this article, the authors describe a formative assessment approach that teachers can use to learn more about their students' mathematical thinking and inform their instructional decisions. This assessment approach draws on a widely…

In "Using Learning Progressions to Design Vertical Scales that Support Coherent Inferences about Student Growth" (hereafter ULR), Briggs and Peck suggest that learning progressions could be used as the basis of vertical scales with naturally benchmarked descriptions of student proficiency. They propose and provide a single example of a…

This article is a commentary of a paper by Derek C. Briggs and Frederick A. Peck, "Using Learning Progressions to Design Vertical Scales That Support Coherent Inferences about Student Growth," which describes an elegant potential framework for at least beginning to address three priorities in large-scale assessment that have not been…

Since 2007 the Oregon DATA Project has been investing resources to provide educators on-the-job training around effective data use to improve student achievement. New evidence shows that their efforts are paying off. A 2011 Oregon DATA Project report detailed the impact of their investment in the state's educators, finding the following: (1)…

Monitoring Trends in Educational Growth (MTEG) offers a flexible, collaborative approach to developing and implementing an assessment of learning outcomes that yields high-quality, nationally relevant data. MTEG is a service that involves ACER staff working closely with each country to develop an assessment program that meets the country's…

This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

This summary presents the main findings from a data mapping and analysis study commissioned by the Local Government Association (LGA) from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) as part of a two-year development and research programme, Narrowing the Gap. This programme seeks to make a significant difference in "narrowing the…

Data generated through the National Assessment of Educational Progress's regular and special reading assessments during the 1970s indicate that the reading performance of historically lower-achieving students has risen considerably. Unfortunately, the significance of the data has not been fully explored by the news media. (PGD)

Many people predicted that 2005 would be the year that schools nationwide began feeling the bite of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, as states ratcheted up their performance targets and more schools failed to meet those benchmarks. But such dire predictions are not playing out uniformly across the states. Of the 33 states and the District of…