While today's curriculum is largely driven by standards, many teachers find the lack of specificity in the standards to be confounding and even intimidating. Now this practical book provides middle and high school teachers with explicit guidance on designing specific objectives and developing appropriate formative and summative assessments to…

Performance-based (authentic) assessments include genuine, useful, applicable, practice-based, transferable, and demonstrable items. They include skills, knowledge, and attitudes that can be carried beyond the classroom. This paper discusses the importance of learning by doing, explains how to use performance-based assessments, and emphasizes the…

This book will help teachers examine and choose reading assessment in relation to current understandings of the reading process, students' development, and the culture of schooling. Each chapter focuses on a particular type of reading assessment to familiarize teachers with the broad array of assessments available; uses the CURRV framework as an…

Portfolios are useful in developing a personal set of rules for good communication and for reflecting on one's performance over time. As a purposeful, interrelated collection of student work the portfolio shows student efforts, progress, and self-reflection. The article uses storytelling as a metaphor to show what portfolios are and what they can…

One of the most influential contemporary trends in educational evaluation in the United States is the move away from traditional testing methods toward "authentic assessments," which are designed to measure student performance of skills, abilities, and knowledge directly. While there is no consensus as to precisely what constitutes authentic…