Design in Five: Essential Phases to Create Engaging Assessment Practice, Second Edition (Make assessments more relevant, meaningful, and focused on student learning.)

This second edition of the best-selling, award-winning Design in Five offers new and targeted information for reimagining assessment practices, as well as refined processes and protocols to fully engage learners. Refinements to the original five-phase protocol come from actual experiences of teachers who have engaged with the process. This is the book you need to design and use assessment well.

• Reflect on current assessment practices to determine their effectiveness
• Learn and implement a five-phase process to design meaningful, relevant assessments that lead to high levels of learning for all
• Align and design items and tasks to learning goals
• Design assessments that help students invest in their learning and take action to improve
• Access numerous reproducible surveys, charts, and sample assessments

Nicole Dimich has a passion for education and lifelong learning, which has led her to extensively explore, facilitate, and implement innovative practices in school improvement. She works with elementary and secondary educators in presentations, trainings, and consultations that address today’s most critical issues, all in the spirit of facilitating improved support of student learning.
Nicole was a high school reform specialist, where she worked closely with school and district staff to support the implementation of small learning communities. This work included coaching individuals and teams of teachers in assessment, literacy, and high expectations for all students. Nicole also helped facilitate and implement a data templates project in collaboration with the University of Minnesota. As training coordinator, she helped elementary and secondary educators design templates to track and analyze data.
A former middle and high school English teacher, Nicole was also a program evaluator and trainer at the Princeton Center for Leadership Training in New Jersey. She produced a training DVD that illustrates a protocol for examining the effectiveness of assessments and student learning. A featured presenter at conferences throughout North America, Nicole empowers educators to build capacity for and implement formative assessment practices, common assessment design and analysis, data-driven decisions, student work protocols, and motivational strategies.
Nicole earned a master of arts in human development from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota and a bachelor of arts in English and psychology from Concordia College. She is pursuing a doctorate.