In recent years, increasing numbers of professional development programs have dealt with assessment literacy for teachers and/or administrators. Is assessment literacy merely a fashionable focus for today's professional developers or, in contrast, should it be regarded as a significant area of professional development interest for many years to…

The importance of educational accountability and assessment literacy is recognized as a long-term challenge to the educational system. The complexities in becoming an assessment literate and provide an opportunity to the educators to display their effective learning is discussed.

Assessment for learning involves the frequent, continual use of both formal and informal classroom assessments. It can be as simple as requiring students to respond to a lesson-embedded, one-item quiz as a way of gauging student understanding of what is being taught. Ideally, this innovative approach to classroom assessment is based on a careful…

This booklet is designed to assist those responsible for conducting educational evaluations. The work contains a collection of recently developed technical procedures relevant to educational evaluation and to describe them in a straightforward manner. The guidelines are organized into three sections: 1) Objectives; 2) Measurement; and 3) Data…

Six deficits of this model are discussed: disparity in proponent prowess, fallible arbiters, excessive confidence in the model's potency, difficulties in framing the proposition in a manner amenable to adversary resolution, "a cat's-paw for biased decision makers," and, excessive costs. (Author/JM)

Specialists in curriculum, instruction, and assessment typically work with colleagues in their own field. It is argued that such isolationism is educationally harmful, especially during today's era of heightened accountability for educators. To diminish excessive specialization by curriculum, instruction, and assessment personnel, amelioration…

This book consists of six self-instructional programs to be completed individually by the reader. Topics of the programs are: current conceptions of educational evaluation; modern measurement methods; instructional supervision; a criterion-referenced strategy; constructing teaching performance tests; using teaching performance tests; and…

In this article, the author draws attention to the fact that in school evaluations, students will improve on state-mandated tests, but the improved scores will not influence a school's adequate yearly progress (AYP) status because those students' scores do not cross the proficiency point. A state's proficiency point on each of its standardized…

Discusses which kinds of data educators should respect and which they should reject. Asserts that most state accountability tests fail to produce the kinds of data that will improve teaching and learning. Teachers can get the data they need from their own instructionally useful classroom assessments. (WFA)