Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance - Softcover

Wiggins, Grant

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0787908487 ISBN 13: 9780787908485

Publisher: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998

Synopsis

Wiggins makes the most convincing case yet that school-based assessment should aim mainly to improve, rather than to audit, student performance. Thanks to his penetrating discussions of feedback, the relationship of formal designs to practice, teaching for understanding, and rubrics, this book should dispel common misconceptions and elevate both the understanding and practice of authentic assessment?
—Fred M. Newmann, professor of curriculum and instruction, University of Wisconsin , Madison

Assessing Student Performance laid out the theoretical foundations of a new assessment system that provides a more authentic picture of student capabilities than standardized testing. In Assessment for Excellence, Grant Wiggins provides guidance on how to design performance-based assessments for use in the classroom. This book covers all aspects of assessment design, including how to craft performance tasks that meet rigorous educational standards, how to score assessments fairly, and how to structure and judge student portfolios. It also looks at how performance assessment can be used to improve curriculum and instruction, grading and reporting?and teacher accountability.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Tests don?t just test, they teach. In this book, Grant Wiggins outlines the design standards for performance-based assessments that promise students, no matter what their ability, clear and worthy performance targets, useful feedback, coaching, and the opportunity to progress toward excellence.
As practical as it is provocative, Educative Assessment furnishes the information needed to design performance-based assessments, craft performance tasks that meet rigorous educational standards, score assessments fairly, and structure and judge student portfolios. It also shows how performance assessment can be used to improve curriculum and instruction, grading and reporting as well as teacher accountability.
\x09In addition, the book includes numerous design templates and flowcharts, strategies of design and troubleshooting, and myriad examples of assessment tasks and scoring rubrics that Wiggins developed and repeatedly refined using feedback from clients in schools, districts, and state department of education.
Following the recommendations for educative assessment mapped out in this book can provide students with authentic tasks that simulate or replicate adult tasks and offer teachers and students useful feedback that can generate stellar classroom performance.

About the Author:

GRANT WIGGINS is the president and director of programs for the Center for Learning, Assessment, and School Structure (CLASS), a non-profit educational research and consulting organization in Pennington, New Jersey. He is the author of Assessing Student Performance (Jossey-Bass)

About this edition

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass Publishers
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0787908487
• ISBN 13: 9780787908485
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 361