This book explores ways to design courses and units to emphasize understanding and uncoverage rather than coverage, offering practical solutions for teacher-designers. It focuses on a different use for performance assessment, concluding that performance is the key to assessing understanding. The book analyzes the logic of backward design as an…

To measure the extent of student opportunities to learn relative to educational reform goals, the Colorado Educational Policy Consortium at the University of Colorado-Denver designed and administered teacher and student surveys about instructional and assessment-related processes statewide. This study uses data from the 1997 teacher survey to…

This book offers a philosophy about classroom assessment that places students at the center of the assessment equation. Classroom assessments must define for students what is expected of them, and they must provide the basis for decision making by students, parents, teachers, administrators, and the community. Part I of this volume, the first five…

The first part of this study replicates an earlier study (D. Waechter, I. Newman, and L. Rosenkoetter, 1998) that used a procedure for authentic assessment of students in a master's level research class, a class that is often feared and avoided by students, by means of a study on humor, since that content would be somewhat incompatible with…

This handbook discusses performance-based licensure for North Carolina's public school teachers. New teachers are responsible for demonstrating that they have the requisite knowledge, skills, and attitudes to achieve licensure. They must demonstrate essential teaching competence using standards developed by the Interstate New Teacher Assessment…

The New Standards Project is a partnership of 17 states and 6 major school districts that have joined to develop alternative approaches to setting educational standards and assessing student achievement. In the New Standards Project plan, formal standard setting occurs through a process of public examination of student work products on pilot…

Researchers of performance assessment in social studies have contrasted authentic assessment, which is characterized by contextualized, complex intellectual challenges, with multiple choice tests of achievement, which are characterized as fragmented and static. In calling for the need for authentic assessment, this paper outlines a plan for the…

Many of those working to improve science and mathematics education have a vision where all students are successful and the celebration of success constantly presents the challenge to push the edge of the vision outward. The National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics established standards that some science educators are attempting to emulate.…

This collection of 29 succinct information articles discusses issues relating to language arts, including whole language, phonics, student evaluation, spelling, and censorship. Some of the authors contributing to the collection are Ken Goodman, Yetta Goodman, Jerome Harste, Patrick Shannon, and Constance Weaver. Titles of articles are:…

This book relies on three categories (visions, contexts, and roles) to explore school renewal as promulgated by participants in the National Education Association's Mastery in Learning Project. Following MIL Project Director Robert McClure's introduction covering participants' collegiality-building experiences, the "Visions" section…

This paper describes uses for one component of an authentic assessment--visual records of achievement. Focus is on the uses of instant photography in visual literacy, multicultural education, and administrative applications. Using instant photography, students and their teachers can create a collection of the students' best work. That visual…

This ERIC Digest was adapted from the Association for Childhood Education International's (ACEI) 1991 position paper on standardized testing. Since the publication of "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, standardized testing programs have expanded greatly. Tests may be of pencil-and-paper or performance-oriented varieties. The purposes of tests…

A description of ecologically valid, authentic, and integrated performance-based assessment instruments of different lengths was undertaken to measure the extent by which students meet Connecticut's Common Core of Learning (CCL) objectives. The description focuses on the students' knowledge and general understanding of science and mathematics;…

This review of the literature on testing urban students indicates that standardized tests may not reflect accurately the ability and achievement of poor minority children. Further, new research in cognition makes clear that both teaching and testing could be structured to better prepare students for the complex thinking required by life. Since…

This paper suggests alternatives for assessing various types of learner outcomes, along with a procedure for deciding which method to use. Whatever the context--continuing education, training, business, or the professions--assessing learner outcomes involves a set of four steps. (1) The first step in designing an assessment is to determine its…