Packed with useful tools, this practitioner guide and course text helps educators assess and teach essential literacy skills and strategies at all grade levels (PreK-12). All six literacy modalities are addressed--listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing, and visually representing. Chapters on specific literacy processes integrate…

In an era of increased teacher accountability, teacher preparation programs across the country are faced with increasing pressure to adopt rigorous and high stakes performance-based assessments, such as edTPA, that provide data-based evidence that their candidates are ready to teach upon program completion. Furthermore, in response to new…

COVID-19 has had a profound impact on all aspects of lives, including how to teach students. It is clear that the K-12 education system as it was known has changed. The pandemic has stressed each level of the education system: the state education agency (SEA), regional education agencies (REA), local education agencies (LEA), tribal education…

While many of the concepts and approaches that comprise student-centered learning have deep roots in learning theory, the cognitive sciences, and youth and child development, empirical research on student-centered learning's impact in K-12 classrooms remains limited. This report offers highlights from three studies commissioned by Nellie Mae,…

In June 2009, The New Teacher Project's study, "The Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness", drew national attention to the issue of ineffective teacher evaluation systems. The study documents how teacher evaluation systems ignore variations in performance, giving virtually all…

Educators are generally untrained in sound assessment basics. They should conduct their own professional development in a total environment that demands and supports quality assessment. This environment should include a district statement of assessment policy, teacher/administrator partnerships, an integrated professional development plan, and…

This book is intended to introduce the classroom teacher and prospective teacher to the elements of measurement and assessment that are essential to good teaching. The main theme is that assessment plays an important role in the instructional process. This edition has been revised to reflect major changes in educational assessment since the last…

Discusses the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and its plan for voluntary national certification of elementary and secondary teachers. Suggests reasons for the lack of national standards for teachers in the past. Describes a proposed certification system that involves performance-based evaluations and an emphasis on independence…

This study uses Partial Credit Rasch analysis to study a complex data set of student responses to survey items relating to chance and data. The items were administered in the classroom and collected from 1993 to 2003 in the Australian state of Tasmania. Data were collected from a total of 5514 individual students across Grades 3 to 11 over the…

This report presents general criteria for authentic pedagogy, instructional activities rooted in a primary concern for high standards of intellectual quality, as well as more specific standards that can be used to judge the quality of assessment tasks, classroom lessons, and student performance. Examples are given of tasks, lessons, and student…

This paper describes what teachers need to know about performance assessment to do it well. First, they should know what performance assessment is and why anyone should care. One thing that has to be emphasized is that there are two parts to a performance assessment: the tasks and the criteria. Teachers tend to be better at developing rich and…

Standardized testing, usually in the form of a multiple choice test, has dominated educational reform throughout Mississippi for the past 2 decades. Because of the minimal impact that standardized testing has traditionally had on curriculum decisions and classroom instruction, a paradigm shift in assessment format was adopted in the State from a…

This book is designed to help educators consider how assessment relates to instruction and recognize how assessment affects student learning. It intends to encourage teachers to establish a climate in which students can safely seek and use assessment information. A basic assumption is that learning occurs best in a positive setting, one that…

Establishing a solid standards-and-assessment system is only the first step toward the ultimate goal of bringing all students to the standards. But without this first step, all others will fall short. The paper explains the essential role of standards and assessments in improving student achievement and offers solutions to challenges districts…

This article presents the results of an 11-year longitudinal study of the impact of America's Choice comprehensive school reform (CSR) design on student learning gains in Rochester, New York. A quasi-experimental interrupted time-series approach using Bayesian hierarchical growth curve analysis with crossed random effects is used to compare the…