Enough has been written about academic assessment to fill a library, but when one thinks about it, the whole enterprise really amounts to a straightforward two-step dance. Collect information about how students are doing, then share that information with the students and their parents. Gather and report--that's pretty much it. Collecting…

Measuring a teacher's effectiveness in quantifiable ways is a logical step in a society driven by the SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely objectives) that pervade modern management. The idea of using student performance on standardized tests to judge a teacher's effectiveness picked up steam after the Obama…

"Many educators think of formative assessment as another kind of test. Instead, it is a process to help instructors understand their students' day-to-day learning and develop appropriate interventions to improve that learning," says Nancy Gerzon, Senior Research Associate at WestEd. "We know from research that effective formative…

It's not often that the goals of closing the achievement gap, providing professional development opportunities to teachers, and benefiting children by using innovative and effective instructional methods coincide. But at Sutterville Elementary School in Sacramento, CA, they do. This article describes the School-Wide Success (SWS) program, its…

School districts, individual schools, and education policies all contribute to student achievement. But it can be argued that the most important contributing factor is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. Evaluating teacher quality is complicated, yet it has become even more important with the testing and assessment focus of No Child Left…

In this article, the author discusses the Dubois school's important discoveries about their instructional program after taking a closer look at the year-by-year academic progress of individual students and their participation in a pilot project of the Pennsylvania education department that provides a value added assessment of student test scores.…