Classroom Assessment: Every Student a Learner

Used with skill, assessment can motivate the reluctant, revive the discouraged, and thereby increase, not simply measure, achievement.

For many of us, assessment is probably not at the top of the list of topics when we think about what we want to spend time learning. But we would guess that, in the last few years, you may have been called upon to do one or more of the following things, each of which may have left you wishing for a stronger understanding of why it is important to do or of how to do it well.

• Develop common assessments with other teachers in your subject area or grade level.

• Work with a team to “deconstruct” the new Common Core State Standards to help identify what should be the content of daily instruction and assessment.

• Attend a Response to Intervention (RTI) training and then make a presentation to the rest of the faculty on the benefits for students.

• Focus on differentiated instruction this year as a strategy to help more students master content standards.

• Use more formative assessment in the classroom because the research says it will work.

• Move to a grading system that centers more on communicating what students know and can achieve and removes from grades such non-achievement variables as attendance, effort, and behavior.

All of these actions, along with many other currently popular school improvement initiatives involving assessment, are aimed at raising student achievement in an era of high-pressure accountability testing. Each action requires classroom teachers to have classroom-level assessment expertise to carry them out effectively. And yet the opportunity to develop that expertise may not have been available to you through pre-service or in-service offerings.

Without a foundation of what we call classroom assessment literacy , few if any of these initiatives will lead to the improvements we want for our students. Assessment-literate educators understand that assessments can serve a variety of important users and fulfill purposes in both supporting and verifying learning. They know that quality assessments arise from crystal-clear achievement targets and are designed and built to satisfy specific assessment quality control criteria. Those steeped in the principles of sound assessment understand that assessment results must be delivered into the hands of the intended user in a timely and understandable form. Finally, they are keenly aware of the fact that assessment can no longer be seen merely as something adults do to students. Rather, students are constantly assessing their own achievement and acting on the inferences they draw about themselves. Assessment-literate educators know how to engage students in productive self-assessments that will support their learning success.

We have framed these components of assessment literacy, derived from the expertise of the measurement community, in terms of five keys to assessment quality. Each chapter will focus on one or more of these keys to quality. Each chapter includes activities you can complete individually, with a partner, or with a team to put the principles of assessment literacy into action in your classroom. By the end of your study, you will have the expertise needed to handle any classroom assessment challenge.