A revision-based assessment system, driven by clear rubrics, can mean less stress, more effective feedback, and greater student learning. English teacher Alexis Wiggins shares an effective and time-friendly revision-based assessment system she developed that allows students to focus on learning, not their grade.

Quizzes and tests don't count as feedback if educators and students can't act upon the information they provide. Two educators share simple tweaks to their quizzes and tests that helped them both get better feedback about their teaching and give better feedback to their students.

Games can be great tools to engage reluctant learners and provide ongoing feedback to educators about how their lessons are "sticking." Cassie discusses how to use gamified formative assessments to measure different kinds of skills and looks at the different ways teachers can use games in the classroom--from out-of-the-box board games to…

As part of "The Wallace Foundation's Principal Pipeline" initiative, six districts have been working to reshape their school leadership evaluation systems to provide better and more consistent feedback to principals--and ultimately to help them grow in their jobs. In this article, Pamela Mendels, a senior editor at Wallace, describes the…

Middle school teacher and author Cris Tovani describes how--after years of feeling frustrated about the time spent commenting on students' work only to find their work didn't improve--she changed both how she responded to student work and what she did with the information such work revealed to her. Tovani changed the timing of her feedback and…

Creativity is a simple concept that can be difficult to get one's head around. In its most basic sense, creative means "original and of high quality." Probably the foremost characteristic of creative students is that they put things together in new ways. Teachers can assess creativity at every grade level and in every subject, using both basic and…

Teachers and education leaders are aware that their words can have a significant effect on their students. Words can build them up and encourage them to work hard or tear them down and lead them to despair. The language used in teacher evaluations is no different, says teacher Brooke Eisenbach. In this article, she shares stories of colleagues…

The term "feedback" is often used to describe all kinds of comments made after the fact, including advice, praise, and evaluation. But none of these are feedback, strictly speaking. Basically, feedback is information about how one is doing in his or her efforts to reach a goal. Whether feedback is just there to be grasped or is provided by another…

Education has a long-standing practice of turning worthwhile learning goals into lists of bits. One might even say that this practice is the original sin in curriculum design: take a complex whole, divide it into small pieces, string those together in a rigid sequence of instruction and testing, and call completion of this sequence…

Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at MIT, designed ELIZA in 1964 as an experiment in artificial intelligence. ELIZA was constructed with a library of ready-made questions that could be summoned at a moment's notice in response to human input. When users' statements fell outside the program's scripting, ELIZA could adapt by rephrasing the words into a…

U.S. teachers grade homework far more than teachers in other countries, yet at least one study shows a negative correlation between grading homework and student achievement. More important, Vatterott notes, grading homework sends students unhelpful signals about the purpose and value of homework. By focusing on the grade, students view homework…

Too often, teacher evaluations haven't provided enough information to spur improvement in teaching. The vast majority of teachers in any school, district, or state are rated above--sometimes well above--average. The feedback that teachers do receive is often not specific enough to help them improve. In this article, Morgaen Donaldson explores some…

Varying definitions of formative assessment have blurred the meaning of the term and caused confusion among educators. To determine whether a test is formative or summative, write the authors of this article, we need to ask, "How are the results going to be used? and Who is going to use them? The purpose of summative assessment is to make a…

Brookhart maintains that clear, positive teacher feedback, which provides precise information on the next steps a student can take to reach their learning targets, is at the heart of formative assessment. Because feedback is closely tied to students' feelings of self-efficacy, it can be destructive as well as motivating. Drawing on research and…