Assessing Student Learning By Design

"How might we might help teachers use classroom assessments to gather appropriate evidence for all valued learning goals? How might our classroom assessments serve to promote learning, not just measure it? This book addresses these questions by offering a practical and proven Assessment Planning Framework. The Framework examines four different types of learning goals, considers various purposes and audiences for assessment, reviews five categories of assessment methods, and presents options for communicating results. This updated edition addresses the assessment of academic standards as well as transdisciplinary outcomes (e.g., 21st century skills), and describes the principles and practices underlying standards-based grading"--

How can we help teachers use classroom assessments to gather appropriate evidence for all valued learning goals, and to use those assessments not just to measure learning but to promote it? This book provides an answer in a practical, proven, and principled Assessment Planning Framework that moves away from solely multiple-choice tests toward a wide range of approaches to classroom assessment activities, including performance-based assessments. The Framework examines four different types of learning goals, considers various purposes and audiences for assessment information, reviews five categories of classroom assessment methods, and presents options for communicating actionable results. To the authors, the primary purpose of classroom assessment is to inform teaching and learning, rather than simply to assign grades. This concise resource will be a reliable go-to reference for teachers, school leaders, mentors, and coaches in guiding classroom assessment practices and understanding their underlying principles. Book Features: Builds on the classic book Understanding by Design, written by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.Offers a practical, nontechnical presentation appropriate for teacher preparation and busy practitioners (K–16).Explores different purposes for, and methods of, classroom assessment and grading.Addresses assessment of academic standards as well as transdisciplinary outcomes, such as 21st-century skills.Describes the principles and practices underlying standards-based grading.

The first edition of Assessing Student Learning has become the standard reference for college faculty and administrators who are charged with the task of assessing student learning within their institutions. The second edition of this landmark book offers the same practical guidance and is designed to meet ever-increasing demands for improvement and accountability. This edition includes expanded coverage of vital assessment topics such as promoting an assessment culture, characteristics of good assessment, audiences for assessment, organizing and coordinating assessment, assessing attitudes and values, setting benchmarks and standards, and using results to inform and improve teaching, learning, planning, and decision making.

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

Using clear explanations and cases, this must-have resource shows how formative assessment can improve student learning. Included are lesson plans and ideas for easy implementation.

Assessing Student Learning is a standard reference for college faculty and administrators, and the third edition of this highly regarded book continues to offer comprehensive, practical, plainspoken guidance. The third edition adds a stronger emphasis on making assessment useful; greater attention to building a culture in which assessment is used to inform important decisions; an enhanced focus on the many settings of assessment, especially general education and co-curricula; a new emphasis on synthesizing evidence of student learning into an overall picture of an integrated learning experience; new chapters on curriculum design and assessing the hard-to-assess; more thorough information on organizing assessment processes; new frameworks for rubric design and setting standards and targets; and many new resources. Faculty, administrators, new and experienced assessment practitioners, and students in graduate courses on higher education assessment will all find this a valuable addition to their bookshelves.

While there is consensus that institutions need to represent their educational effectiveness through documentation of student learning, the higher education community is divided between those who support national standardized tests to compare institutions’ educational effectiveness, and those who believe that valid assessment of student achievement is based on assessing the work that students produce along and at the end of their educational journeys. This book espouses the latter philosophy—what Peggy Maki sees as an integrated and authentic approach to providing evidence of student learning based on the work that students produce along the chronology of their learning. She believes that assessment needs to be humanized, as opposed to standardized, to take into account the demographics of institutions, as students do not all start at the same place in their learning. Students also need the tools to assess their own progress. In addition to updating and expanding the contents of her first edition to reflect changes in assessment practices and developments over the last seven years, such as the development of technology-enabled assessment methods and the national need for institutions to demonstrate that they are using results to improve student learning, Maki focuses on ways to deepen program and institution-level assessment within the context of collective inquiry about student learning. Recognizing that assessment is not initially a linear start-up process or even necessarily sequential, and recognizing that institutions develop processes appropriate for their mission and culture, this book does not take a prescriptive or formulaic approach to building this commitment. What it does present is a framework, with examples of processes and strategies, to assist faculty, staff, administrators, and campus leaders to develop a sustainable and shared core institutional process that deepens inquiry into what and how students learn to identify and improve patterns of weakness that inhibit learning. This book is designed to assist colleges and universities build a sustainable commitment to assessing student learning at both the institution and program levels. It provides the tools for collective inquiry among faculty, staff, administrators and students to develop evidence of students’ abilities to integrate, apply and transfer learning, as well as to construct their own meaning. Each chapter also concludes with (1) an Additional Resources section that includes references to meta-sites with further resources, so users can pursue particular issues in greater depth and detail and (2) worksheets, guides, and exercises designed to build collaborative ownership of assessment.The second edition now covers: * Strategies to connect students to an institution’s or a program’s assessment commitment* Description of the components of a comprehensive institutional commitment that engages the institution, educators, and students--all as learners* Expanded coverage of direct and indirect assessment methods, including technology-enabled methods that engage students in the process* New case studies and campus examples covering undergraduate, graduate education, and the co-curriculum* New chapter with case studies that presents a framework for a backward designed problem-based assessment process, anchored in answering open-ended research or study questions that lead to improving pedagogy and educational practices* Integration of developments across professional, scholarly, and accrediting bodies, and disciplinary organizations* Descriptions and illustrations of assessment management systems* Additional examples, exercises, guides and worksheets that align with new content