The second edition of this exceptionally lucid and practical assessment text provides a wealth of powerful concrete examples that help students to understand assessment concepts and to effectively use assessment to support learning. The book offers unique coverage of ways to use assessment to support student learning across the developmental span from Kindergarten through high school. Rather than treat assessment separately from instruction, this book’s unique approach treats assessment as a central factor in the life of a teacher every day, whether it’s part of planning instruction, composing small study groups, or communicating test results to pupils, parents and principals. The book also provides more coverage than any other classroom assessment text of how to adapt assessment to the needs of students with disabilities and students whose first language is not English.
This is a book about students and teachers: student learning and effective teaching. It is not a textbook about how to give tests and grades. Done well, assessment can help students learn complex and important ideas and develop the knowledge and skills they need to evaluate and improve their work long after they leave your classroom. Done poorly, assessment can inflict lifelong damage to students' curiosity, their images of themselves, and their opportunities in the future. In short, assessment has the power to do tremendous good or tremendous harm. Our goal in this book is to help teachers and other educators understand this power and use it wisely and ethically.
SUPPORTING TEACHING AND LEARNING IN REAL CLASSROOMS
In this book, we show how assessment plays a central role in the everyday lives of teachers. From planning instruction, to listening to students as they struggle and explore, to deciding the composition of small groups, to communicating the results of assessments to students, parents, and others, teachers use assessment every day of their professional lives. Throughout the book, we provide examples based on the assessment experiences of teachers with whom we have worked and students we have known. We show how teachers can effectively use assessment to support the learning of increasingly diverse groups of students, from kindergarten through high school (and beyond). We consider the impact of assessment decisions and practices on student learning and motivation and on the experiences of students with different abilities. This is a book about assessment with a heart.
We have organized the book around our philosophy as teachers and teacher educators. Many textbooks on assessment begin with information about how to create test items and tests, but we begin with a focus on work worth doing. Real work is at the center of this book—work that helps students understand why they learn what they learn. Just as a piano teacher teaches beginners to play songs at the same time they are learning chords and scales, we ask you to think about real applications of knowledge and skills before thinking about assessing the parts of the whole.
TEXT ORGANIZATION AND SPECIAL FEATURES
Section 1: The Role of Assessment in Supporting Teaching and Learning
In the first section of the book, we introduce you to a new way of thinking about assessment in your classroom. This section introduces you to some of the important concepts and content of this book, and it tells you about our philosophy of assessment. The text does not present a collection of separable skills to be memorized and forgotten. We hope to convince you that by learning this material you can be a more effective teacher—one who is more successful at helping students learn, and who is able to argue effectively for your own philosophy of assessment.
In Chapter 1, we orient you to a way of thinking about assessment that is grounded in the belief that all valid assessments can be used to support teaching and learning. We explain why educators must move beyond a view of assessment as something that happens only on tests to a position in which assessment is a natural, indeed inseparable, part of good teaching. In this chapter, we describe the book's organization, including concepts and themes that you will find throughout the book. We describe general considerations for assessing students with special needs, including those with disabilities and those who are still learning to speak and write in English.
In Chapter 2, we elaborate on the role of valid assessment in effective teaching. We begin at the beginning of a teacher's work: deciding what is most important for students to learn. Unless you have a clear sense of what is most important, you cannot effectively plan for instruction or assessment. We share resources for making these important decisions and show you how to construct learning goals and objectives that are powerful and flexible teaching tools. Finally, we give you examples of how teachers in real classrooms can use assessment throughout the instructional process.
Chapter 3, Effects of Classroom-Based Assessments on Students, lays out the motivational framework for this book. The connections among classroom instructional and assessment practices, student motivation and persistence, and student learning are described. If students are motivated to learn, assessment information and supportive feedback can be seen as personally useful. We provide general suggestions for supporting student motivation to learn, to which we return throughout the book. We also discuss the role assessment and feedback play in students' developing ideas about the subjects they are learning: Is math an exploration of patterns or a collection of memorized formulas? Is social studies the development of citizens in a democracy or the names of state capitals? To the extent that students see assessments as relevant to their own goals, they are more likely to use assessment results and teacher feedback for their own learning and growth.
Section 2: Performance Assessment
When students have learned deeply and thoroughly, they can use their knowledge in flexible and complex ways to do the real work of musicians, scientists, historians, artists, and writers. In this section we show you how to create both formal and informal performance assessments in a variety of subject areas for all of your students. Chapter 4 introduces the idea of assessment of valued performances. Chapter 5 presents information about how to use informal performance assessments to guide instruction and students' learning. The assessment techniques in this section can serve a broad range of purposes, from efficient ways of "sizing up" students at the beginning of the year, to diagnostic assessments of struggling readers, to creating graduation projects that require students to combine skills and understandings across subjects and from years of schooling. In both chapters we discuss the implications of performance assessment for student motivation. We provide models for giving feedback on student work that support both further learning and motivation. Here, as elsewhere, we give suggestions for adapting assessments for learners with special needs. We also examine issues of validity and reliability for performance-based assessments.
Section 3: Classroom Testing
The three chapters in this section focus on creating and evaluating tests. Chapter 6 describes how to plan for and build a test, including tips on how to make tests more "friendly" for students and how to use test results for your own feedback and planning. Chapter 7 presents guidelines for traditional test items (multiple-choice, short-answer, completion, matching, and true-false), and Chapter 8 presents guidelines for performance items (essay items, performance tasks, and standardized direct writing assessments). Together these chapters should help you evaluate the tests you find in textbooks and staff rooms, as well as help you create tests that truly fit with your instruction and complement your assessments of valued performances. As with other chapters, we also address issues of reliability and validity, students with special needs, and motivational issues in testing.
Section 4: Summarizing Student Achievement
In the final section of the book, we present a variety of ways to summarize and communicate about students' achievement. In Chapter 9 we present a variety of different ways to summarize grades, including comparative grading (not a favorite), criterion-referenced grading, and standards-based grading. In Chapter 10 we give guidelines for developing and using portfolios to communicate about students' learning. This chapter puts the students at the center of the summary process—making them agents in communicating about what they are learning. In Chapter 11, we describe a variety of ways to communicate about students' achievement to parents and other adults. Finally, in Chapter 12, we describe standardized tests, where they come from, and how to use them in your teaching without letting them dominate good teaching and good assessment practice. Throughout these chapters we discuss reliability and validity, children with special needs, and issues of motivation.
A FEW FINAL WORDS
We hope that this book can help you embrace assessment as a way to support yourself and your students. We wrote it because every day we see teachers who feel overwhelmed by the power of standardized tests and by their lack of knowledge and skill in creating assessments and interpreting assessment information. We know that a preface cannot adequately communicate how powerful and positive assessment can be in your classroom. If you have had positive assessment experiences, you may read this book to look for ways to create similar experiences for your students. If you see assessment as an inherently negative part of teaching, you may read this book with reserve.
We hope we can empower all of you to see the potential for assessment to help students be more successful in school. The stories we tell and the examples we give throughout the book come from our own experiences as teachers, as friends of teachers, as teachers of teachers, as mothers, and as former students. Let us know what you think.
