Within the world of assessments, there are two paramount ideologies at work: assessments for learning and assessments of learning. Both forms of assessments serve a distinct and powerful purpose, and it's important to understand how they play off one another and ultimately enhance instruction, intervention, and student achievement.
There are many types of assessments. Nowadays, educators often talk about formative and summative assessment. However, in edTPA, assessments are categorized as informal and formal. It is possible to align informal assessment with formative and formal with summative.
Getting a true sense of students’ learning and discouraging cheating is tough when some students are in the room and some are at home, but it can be done.
Formal and informal assessments provide significant insight into students’ progress, curriculum effectiveness and teaching strategies. Although there has been recent parental pushback on overuse of standardized tests, the data collected from them does not drift off into the ether. One of the best ways to encourage parental and student buy-in for assessment is to explain how data from many kinds of tests is used to improve teaching.
Whether you’re an administrator, supervisor, or teacher, you’ve heard of formative assessments and summative assessments. But what do they actually mean?
Interventions aren’t new to education—they’re a long-time component of good instructional practices. But as districts implement multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) and response to intervention (RtI), interventions are being tracked, monitored, and tied to program evaluation in a way that is new to many. It’s also brought some lingering questions around best practices and how interventions fit with instruction to light.
This school provides an example of using Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) to enable teachers to differentiate and provide each student the right level of instruction to succeed. This video focuses on MTSS academic supports.
Although assessments of learning are important if we are to ascribe grades to students and provide accountability, teachers should also focus more on assessment *for* learning. These types of assessment—formative assessments—support learning during the learning process.
Formative assessment—discovering what students know while they’re still in the process of learning it—can be tricky. Designing just the right assessment can feel high stakes—for teachers, not students—because we’re using it to figure out what comes next. Are we ready to move on? Do our students need a different path into the concepts? Or, more likely, which students are ready to move on and which need a different path?
A teaching team demonstrates how they use formative assessment with students in the classroom to make adjustments and respond to student learning and understanding. They use informal/formal assessment practices with a range of strategies for students and teachers to communicate understanding.
Beth Hennessey is a professor of psychology at Wellesley College, and she studies the powerful link between intrinsic task motivation and creativity performance. This talk was given at a TEDx event and answers the question, "What can intrinsic motivation and creativity do in a classroom?"
In this handout, we provide information on Bloom’s Taxonomy—a way of thinking about schoolwork that can change the way students study and learn to better align with how professors think (and how they grade).
Higher-order questions are those that the students cannot answer just by simple recollection or by reading the information “verbatim” from the text. Higher-order questions put advanced cognitive demand on students. They encourage students to think beyond literal questions.
Use these levels of questions to challenge students in all grade levels with various types of questions as defined by Bloom's Taxonomy. They will be doing higher-level thinking and you will have a more interesting classroom!
Student-centered discussion strategies are described in this article in pursuance of insuring that ALL student voices have a chance to be heard in the classroom. Discussion strategies that are presented include the following: The 10 Second Rule, Think-Pair-Share, Quick Writes, Recorder-Reporter, and K-W-L.
The social curriculum conveys the values, belief systems, and expectations of behavior in school. It is just as important as the academic curriculum, but is often "hidden" for children with learning challenges. Here you'll find some effective strategies to intentionally facilitate social inclusion in your classroom and school-wide.
