Activating Assessment For All Students

This book builds on the expanding knowledge of what works in classrooms and suggests approaches that can open up individual and group possibilities for science and mathematics instruction, suggesting ways that formative assessment practices can inform differentiated teaching, learning, and assessment.

Formative assessment plays an important role in increasing teacher quality and student learning when it’s viewed as a process rather than a tool. Emphasizing the instructional side of formative assessment, this book explores in depth the use of classroom questioning, learning intentions and success criteria, feedback, collaborative and cooperative learning, and self-regulated learning to engineer effective learning environments for students.

This second edition gives you more than 60 tools--with tips and implementation steps--for creating and using formative assessments in every grade level and subject. --from publisher description

"Acknowledgments"--"Table of Contents"--"About the Author" -- "Introduction" -- "Chapter 1" -- "Chapter 2" -- "Chapter 3" -- "Chapter 4" -- "Chapter 5" -- "Chapter 6" -- "Chapter 7" -- "Epilogue" -- "Appendix" -- "References and Resources

Assessment for Learning is based on a two-year project involving thirty-six teachers in schools in Medway and Oxfordshire. After a brief review of the research background and of the project itself, successive chapters describe the specific practices which teachers found fruitful and the underlying ideas about learning that these developments illustrate. Later chapters discuss the problems that teachers encountered when implementing the new practices in their classroom and give guidance for school management and LEAs about promoting and supporting the changes. --from publisher description

Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education. The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective? At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning. Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored. With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.

Effective classroom formative assessment helps educators make minute-by-minute, day-by-day instructional decisions, but putting it into practice requires both a robust collection of techniques and an understanding of how to use them. In Embedding Formative Assessment, authors Dylan Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy deliver a clear, practical guide for teachers, centred on the five key strategies for improving teacher practice and student achievement: 1) Clarifying, sharing and understanding learning intentions and success criteria; 2) Engineering productive discussion and activities that elicit evidence of learning; 3) Providing feedback that moves learners forward; 4) Activating students as learning resources for each other; and 5) Activating students as owners of their own learning. Then, for each strategy, the authors provide an overview of the strategy and a number of very practical formative assessment techniques for implementing it in F-12 classrooms. Along with guidance on when and how to use the specific techniques, they provide tips, cautions and enhancements to sustain formative assessment. A student reflection form, peer observation form and self-reflection checklist accompany each strategy. No known practice is more effective than classroom formative assessment for producing a significant positive impact on student achievement. Wiliam and Leahy provide the necessary tips and techniques to put it into practice immediately.

Written under the guidance and with the support of Dylan Wiliam, Kate Jones writes about five formative assessment strategies in action in the classroom, with a foreword from Professor John Hattie. Building on the highly successful work of Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy, ideas are shared and misconceptions with formative assessment are addressed with lots of practical advice. Formative assessment in action focuses on five evidence-informed strategies that the teacher can use to support their learners to make progress. Formative assessment can help both the teacher and student understand what needs to be learned and how this can be achieved. During the learning process, formative assessment can identify students' progress as well as highlighting gaps in their knowledge and understanding, therefore giving the teacher useful insight as to what feedback and instruction can be provided to continue to move learners forward. Formative assessment takes place during the learning process. It continually informs the teacher and student as to how learning can move forward as it is happening. This is different to summative assessment, which focuses on the evaluation of student learning at the end of the process. There's a range of case studies from different subjects and key stages to show how formative assessment can be embedded across a curriculum successfully.