The College Board's recently revised curriculum for advanced placement (AP) chemistry places a strong emphasis on conceptual understanding, including representations of particle phenomena. This change in emphasis is informed by years of research showing that students could perform algorithmic calculations but not explain those calculations…

Feedback provides a vehicle for integrating all components of formative instructional practices: clear learning targets, evidence of student learning, and student ownership in the process. Feedback is the keystone to formative instructional practices as it is one of the most powerful instructional tools available. This paper (a) describes the role…

Teaching with song lyrics has many popular variations. The Common Core State Standards discourage pre-teaching, leaving students somewhat adrift. Song lyrics possess the potential to scaffold students' schema in select social studies topics. Using reciprocal teaching (Palinscar & Brown 1984) within the reading workshop students ponder…

The main aim of this research was to analyse teachers' views of pupil assessment. The theoretical framework was based on existing literature on advances and challenges of pupil assessment in regard to support for learning, fairness, educational partnership, feedback, and favourable methods. The data were gathered by means of a questionnaire…

This policy report provides a guide and framework to early childhood policymakers considering formative assessment. The report defines formative assessment and outlines its process and application in the context of early childhood. The substance of this document is the issues for consideration in the implementation of the formative assessment…

Purpose: The Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) is an online task-based assessment of distributed instructional leadership. In developing CALL, researchers faced the challenge of structuring survey items that would measure leadership practice rather than individual traits. Critical in this work was developing items that…

The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL), examines through four lines of study to determine how college- and career-readiness (CCR) standards are implemented, if they improve student learning, and what instructional tools measure and support their implementation. This brief presents findings from C-SAIL's…

Contemporary American education initiatives mandate half of all English language arts content is non-fiction. History topics, therefore, will increase within all elementary and English language arts middle level classrooms. The education initiatives have rigorous expectations for students' close readings of, and written argumentation about,…

In this study, we identified the code-related (decoding, fluency) and language comprehension (vocabulary, listening comprehension) demands of the CBM-Maze test, a formative assessment, and compared them to those of the Gates-MacGinitie test, a standardized summative assessment. The demands of these reading comprehension tests and their…

This study illustrates why preschool children who are dual language learners (DLLs) are not a homogeneous group. An empirically developed model of preschool DLL subgroups, based on latent class analysis, was presented. The model reflects three separate subgroups of DLL children present in many classrooms where DLL children are served: Bilinguals,…

To fulfill the European Higher Education context in the subject of the Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Degree of University of Barcelona named "Chemical Engineering Experimentation II" team work, written and oral communication generic skills were developed and assessed by means of rubrics. In order to appraise the methodological…

The Ontario Ministry of Education recently implemented the Steps to English Proficiency (STEP) language assessment framework to build educator capacity for addressing the needs of English language learners (ELLs) in K-12 schools. The STEP framework is a set of descriptors-based language proficiency scales that specify observable linguistic…

A 2011 report by the Department of Education states that understanding how teachers use results from formative assessments to guide their practice is necessary to improve instruction. Chemistry teachers have goals for items in their formative assessments, but the degree of alignment between what is assessed by these items and the teachers' goals…

This study explored integrating formative assessment to a Chinese high school chemistry classroom, where the extremely high-stakes testing and Confucian-heritage culture constituted a particular context, through a collaborative action research. One researcher worked with a high school chemistry teacher in China to integrate formative assessment…

This article focuses on the grade-level outcomes to be assessed on middle school (grades 6-8) physical education. Specifically, the article describes how to teach basic tactics and strategies while applying fundamental movement patterns to the various game and movement categories (invasion, net/wall, target, fielding/striking, dance/rhythms, &…