How can formative assessment be used as a means to support teacher professional learning? This book presents several studies, from different countries, on approaches to formative assessment of teachers, both before they start working, and during their careers. These approaches draw on insights from studies into effective teacher professional development. Together, the chapters in this book provide an overview of the various ways in which formative assessment may be used to support teacher professional learning, and shed light on choices that can be made in designing such assessments. The studies illustrate how teachers may perceive formative assessment methods, how their learning processes might unfold during formative assessment processes, and which struggles they may have to deal with during the process. The book furthermore addresses questions concerning the impact of formative assessments on teacher learning. As such, this volume provides theoretical as well as practical prospects, as well as challenging ideas for how formative assessment may move further towards being an effective means for supporting teacher learning. This book was originally published as a special issue of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice.

Human judgements underlie all assessments regarding the quality of students' understandings, and such judgements are conceptually complex and elusive. The study of the complexity of the judgement process is in its infancy but clearly warrants further critical investigation. However, what is demonstrated from the wide variety of international teacher judgement practices presented in this volume is that teacher judgement requires a lot more than a set of standards, criteria and annotated examples. Understandings of assessment theory by pre-service teachers through to more experienced teachers, and opportunities for all to critically reflect and consider their judgements of student work, are vital. Teachers are struggling to maintain their interpretive freedom at the local, professional level in contexts where central policies promote standardisation or 'regulation' of judgement practice, for accountability purposes. This book was originally published as a special issue of Assessment in Education: principles, policy & practice.

Assessment of educational achievement, whether by traditional examinations or by teachers in schools, attracts considerable public interest, particularly when it is associated with 'high stakes' outcomes such as university entry or selection for employment. When the individual's results do not chime with their or their teachers' expectations, doubts creep in about the process of assessment that has arrived at this result. However, educational assessment is made up of many layers of complexity, which are not always clear to the general public, including teachers, students, and parents, and which are not easily understood outside of the expert assessment community. These layers may be organized in highly co-dependent relationships that include reliability, validity, human judgment, and errors, and the uses and interpretations of the various types of assessment. No-one could reasonably argue that the principles and complexities of educational assessment should be core learning in public education, but there is a growing realization that trust in the UK assessment system is under some threat as the media and others sensationalize or politicize any problems that arise each year. This book offers the first comprehensive overview of how the general public is considered to perceive and understand a wide variety of aspects of educational assessment, and how this understanding may be improved. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Oxford Review of Education.

edTPA is the most widely-used performance assessment for pre-service teachers in the United States, and a requirement in many states for teaching licensure. Through edTPA, teacher candidates demonstrate their effectiveness in different aspects of teaching, including planning, instruction, assessment, analysis of teaching, and use of academic language. This book is a practical guide for anyone involved in edTPA implementation. The chapters are written by experienced teacher educators who are leading successful edTPA programs in their own universities, who are in the field, and involved in the work. They represent diverse teacher preparation programs, each with their own strengths and challenges. This book addresses the challenges of edTPA, while providing practical strategies for educative and thoughtful implementation. Organized into four sections, each section explores a different aspect of edTPA implementation, and provides guidance for leading faculty and teacher candidates through edTPA.

Social Justice and Educational Measurement addresses foundational concerns at the interface of standardized testing and social justice in American schools. Following John Rawls's philosophical methods, Stein builds and justifies an ethical framework for guiding practices involving educational measurement. This framework demonstrates that educational measurement can both inhibit and ensure just educational arrangements. It also clarifies a principled distinction between efficiency-oriented testing and justice-oriented testing. Through analysis of several historical case studies that exemplify ethical issues related to testing, this book explores and propounds speculative design principles and arguments in favour of radically democratic school reforms, which address how the future of testing might be shaped to ensure justice for all. These case studies cover the widespread use of IQ-style testing in schools during the early decades of the 20th century; the founding of the Educational Testing Service; and the recent history of test-based accountability associated with No Child Left Behind. Social Justice and Educational Measurement will be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in education, testing and assessment, and the philosophy of education. It will also be of interest to policymakers and educational administrators.

Originally published in 1968, at a time when the current public examination systems were coming under close scrutiny this volume discusses completely and fully the merits and demerits of various methods of educational measurement, starting with the theories from which they evolved and going on to observe their efficacy in practice. School-based systems of measurement are also studied, both as separate entities and in comparison with the public examinations at 11+, CSE and 'O' and 'A'-levels of the GCE. The subject-matter of this book was intended to affect students, practising teachers and educationists and, whatever their views, they were able to use the authors' exposition of this controversial subject as a starting point for further and deeper discussion.

Based on three years of detailed anthropological observation, this account of undergraduate culture portrays students' academic relations to faculty and administration as one of subjection. With rare intervals in crisis moments, student life has always been dominated by grades and grade point averages. The authors of "Making the Grade "maintain that, though it has taken different forms from tune to time, the emphasis on grades has persisted in academic life. From this premise they argue that the social organization giving rise to this emphasis has remained remarkably stable throughout the century.

Becker, Geer, and Hughes discuss various aspects of college life and examine the degree of autonomy students have over each facet of their lives. Students negotiate with authorities the conditions of campus political and organizational life--the student government, independent student organizations, and the student newspaper--and preserve substantial areas of autonomous action for themselves. Those same authorities leave them to run such aspects of their private lives as friendships and dating as they wish. But, when it comes to academic matters, students are subject to the decisions of college faculties and administrators.

Becker deals with this continuing lack of autonomy in student life in his new introduction. He also examines new phenomena, such as the impact of "grade inflation" and how the world of real adult work has increasingly made professional and technical expertise, in addition to high grades, the necessary condition for success. "Making the Grade "continues to be an unparalleled contribution to the studies of academics, students, and college life. It will be of interest to university administrators, professors, students, and sociologists.

The assessment of the National Curriculum has evolved from the first blueprint of the TGAT Report through a series of policy decisions and early experience of implementation. The pace of change, the complexity of the proposed assessment system and the political rhetoric associated with it have served to confuse and so obscure the trends in policy and practice. This book offers an account of that system and explains why it is now emerging in a substantially different form from that envisaged by its originators.

The assessment of the National Curriculum has evolved from the first blueprint of the TGAT Report through a series of policy decisions and early experience of implementation. The pace of change, the complexity of the proposed assessment system and the political rhetoric associated with it have served to confuse and so obscure the trends in policy and practice. This book offers an account of that system and explains why it is now emerging in a substantially different form from that envisaged by its originators.

In the wake of initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and the use of high-stakes testing, the emphasis in schools has been on drill and practice for the test. Genuine understanding and critical thinking have been increasingly shortchanged. As a result, students have fewer opportunities to advance their insight into cognitive and emotional challenges, even though both teachers and parents recognize the importance of developing deliberative and reflective thinking skills. This book uniquely combines two things. First, it provides resources for classroom teachers in grades 3 - 6 that make it possible for them, at a moment's notice, to take advantage of a teachable moment by drawing students into productive intellectual discussions. Second, it gives the reader an overview of the rationale and the research base for engaging students in educational activities that are truly intellectual and that are not limited to training for testing success.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Equipped with cultural tools like cell phones, computers and video cameras, youth are called upon to improvise and construct themselves symbolically in a continuously connected world; yet new teachers and students are still expected to learn and deliver standardized, placeless forms of scripted curriculum. This volume argues for improvisation as an approach to curriculum that recognizes the fundamentally creative aspects of learning that are often marginalized in communities of disadvantage. It provides interesting possibilities for schools that are working hard to keep up with technological, economic and cultural change, and argues for an improvised middle ground between structure and creativity. This volume outlines a two-year research project performed in a Canadian middle school, where school staff used student filmmaking as a way to expand teachers' conceptions of literacy. It analyzes the response of students and parents as well as the student teachers that brought the program to the school. The improvisational techniques used while making the films paved the way for larger benefits of curricular improvisation to be explored.

Designed as a handbook, this text provides media, speech (public speaking, interpersonal, small group, and organizational communication), and theatre educators with both the theoretical and practical ammunition to fight the assessment battles on their campuses. The philosophical implications of accountability are balanced with concrete, specific, and usable assessment strategies. Stressing student, faculty, course, program, department, and institutional assessment, this book's aim is to provide, in one place, information that will help diverse and complex communication programs face the growing challenges in assessment.
The book is divided into three sections: background and foundational information for assessment; broad assessment strategies that apply to a variety of media, "speech," and theatre courses and programs; and context-specific assessment strategies. While covering a host of topics, it:
* provides an overview of assessment and suggests how it might impact communication education,
* discusses the elements of program assessment and how linkage of mission statements with outcomes can lead to strong, innovative programs,
* compares and contrasts regional association requirements and presents a specific how-to strategy for writing outcome statements,
* discusses teaching evaluation and argues that we need to identify the "what" of teaching before we try to measure the "how,"
* looks at creative ways for formative and summative course evaluation that starts with the creation of an explicit syllabus,
* discusses the use of capstone courses as a way of evaluating not only their major but also how students have integrated their "total" educational experience,
* suggests the variety of ways that interpersonal communication can be assessed and calls for future research that stresses the "knowledge" component of learning,
* reports on a strategy for developing small group communication assessment measures, and
* provides media, speech, and theatre faculty and administrators with the background, understanding and tools to build stonger programs and develop better courses and educational experiences for their students.

Designed as a handbook, this text provides media, speech (public speaking, interpersonal, small group, and organizational communication), and theatre educators with both the theoretical and practical ammunition to fight the assessment battles on their campuses. The philosophical implications of accountability are balanced with concrete, specific, and usable assessment strategies. Stressing student, faculty, course, program, department, and institutional assessment, this book's aim is to provide, in one place, information that will help diverse and complex communication programs face the growing challenges in assessment.
The book is divided into three sections: background and foundational information for assessment; broad assessment strategies that apply to a variety of media, "speech," and theatre courses and programs; and context-specific assessment strategies. While covering a host of topics, it:
* provides an overview of assessment and suggests how it might impact communication education,
* discusses the elements of program assessment and how linkage of mission statements with outcomes can lead to strong, innovative programs,
* compares and contrasts regional association requirements and presents a specific how-to strategy for writing outcome statements,
* discusses teaching evaluation and argues that we need to identify the "what" of teaching before we try to measure the "how,"
* looks at creative ways for formative and summative course evaluation that starts with the creation of an explicit syllabus,
* discusses the use of capstone courses as a way of evaluating not only their major but also how students have integrated their "total" educational experience,
* suggests the variety of ways that interpersonal communication can be assessed and calls for future research that stresses the "knowledge" component of learning,
* reports on a strategy for developing small group communication assessment measures, and
* provides media, speech, and theatre faculty and administrators with the background, understanding and tools to build stonger programs and develop better courses and educational experiences for their students.

This innovative book offers a new approach to assessment in which learners can follow their own learning journey using cumulative feedback or measurements of distance travelled from different starting points. Education currently mirrors the values and practices of a highly competitive world with testing, grading and monitoring of standards becoming its driving forces. Competition may stimulate high achievers, but may also demotivate or even damage the rest. Ipsative feedback (on progress) and personal learning gain measurements are often hidden. A range of global case studies from school and higher education illustrate four themes: the benefits of ipsative feedback, making good use of learning gain measurement, the challenges of implementing these novel practices and how to combine new approaches with traditional assessment methods. Exploring the difficulties of turning the tables on hierarchies based on achievement and whether it is fair to elevate progress, this book will be the start of conversations about a future that is not obsessed with testing and grades.

This volume presents a variety of overall assessments of technology and individual descriptions of work-in-progress. Supported by private funders, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and a variety of other sources, these efforts address education programs focused on specific subject matter such as mathematics or troubleshooting of school-based learning using computers. They also focus on classes of technology such as intelligent systems, distance learning, and hypertext. Taken together, they portray the range of strategies through which we can begin to understand the impact of educational technology in the future. In addition, they illustrate different approaches currently adopted by technology designers to place and explain their work in a larger context.
Each of the chapters presents a different point of entry on the technology assessment problem. Even those nominally focused on a single implementation, such as testing or teacher observation, demonstrate the clear interest by their authors in the larger implications of their work.

This book provides teachers and school leaders with practical, effective, and proven assessment strategies that are immediately implementable in classrooms. You'll learn about 20 high-impact formative assessment strategies, with details on how they can be applied to a variety of content areas and grade levels, including mathematics, science, language arts, social studies, and various electives. In this accessible book, these experienced authors demonstrate the how and why, along with a framework for folding these new ideas into job-embedded professional development. 20 Formative Assessment Strategies that Work provides the full toolkit for implementing, managing, and modifying these assessment strategies in your school and classrooms today.

Teacher Evaluation in Music: A Guide for Music Teachers in the U. S. aims to help music teachers navigate the controversial terrain of teacher evaluation. Rather than entering the debate on policy divorced from practice, this book is intended as a pragmatic approach to help music teachers to thrive within teacher evaluation systems and as a way to improve practice. Using Shulman's concept of content knowledge, general pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge, this book strives to help music teachers find a balance between advocating for themselves and their programs and for using teacher evaluation to improve their teaching. The book covers history of policy and law of teacher evaluation and the competing uses of teacher evaluation to rate teachers or as a professional development tool. The descriptions of policies, laws, and competing uses are approached in a way to help music teachers use teacher evaluation for their benefit to grow as professionals. This book has chapters devoted to giving detailed and specific strategies in key areas that research has suggested music teachers struggle to implement: questioning, literacy, differentiated instruction, and assessment. Complimenting these key areas are sample lesson plans which apply the strategies of questioning, differentiation, literacy, and assessment discussed in each chapter. These lessons serve as a resource and guide for teachers to develop their own lessons and improve their practice. The final chapter gives guidance on how music teachers may talk to administrators and evaluators to make teacher evaluation productive. Through these detailed descriptions of understanding teacher evaluation, talking to evaluators, and improving practice, music teachers may not just survive but thrive in these systems of accountability.

This study examines the implications for evaluation and assessment when more responsibility for the learning process is given to the learner. Including a new section which explains how to match the evaluation system to the environment, this revised edition includes sections on peer assessment, self-assessment, styles of evaluation, references, and the roles of teacher and learner. The ideas are illustrated with numerous case studies and suggestions for group work and discussion.

Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, high-stakes testing has become a ubiquitous feature of public school children's daily rituals. Reform advocates argue that testing leads to greater alignment of the curriculum with teaching and learning, teacher and student accountability, and in some cases, a preservation of our cultural heritage. Opponents contend that testing results in prolific cheating, higher drop-out rates, and a narrowing curriculum with emphases on teaching to the test. Moreover, some evidence suggests that a singular focus on passing the test at all costs leads to neglect in other areas including attending to students' spiritual and ethical needs as well as developing abilities to collaborate with others, communicate effectively, and innovatively solve problems. Nearly a century ago, Dewey proposed a philosophy of education addressing the needs of the whole student. He provided insights into the development of intelligence, the importance of socially useful skills, and the healthy growth of the individual. In the context of high-stakes testing and best practices, his insights may be more prescient than ever.

Participation is a vital element of working with children and young people ensuring that services are meeting their needs as well as promoting citizenship, resilience and general well-being. The Evaluator s Cookbook contains 21 participatory evaluation exercises for use with children, young people and families/community groups. Attractively and clearly presented, the exercises are very easy to use and come with suggestions for use and instructions on how to create the equipment needed. They will appeal to a wide range of people and can be used in a variety of informal and formal settings and most of the exercises are suitable for use with disabled children or children with special needs, as well as people with English as a second language. The book also explores why, how and where participatory research and evaluation should take place and provides suggestions on how the findings can be presented in imaginative ways. This unique book is an invaluable resource for those wishing to consult with children and families or evaluate social, health and education services in diverse cultural settings.

Why assess?, What can I assess?, How can I assess satisfactorily in physical education (PE)?, these and other questions are examined in this volume, which offers both practical advice and theoretical perspectives relating assessment in PE to assessment in other subjects and in school issues generally. The book has been written over a period in which the interim report of the working party for PE and the statutory orders for PE have been published, Ministers for Education have been changed and the government has been constantly shifting or changing its views on aspects of assessment to do with the National Curriculum.

In the past, assessment was underplayed or neglected in the training of physical education teachers. Physical education lay, largely, outside of school's formal structures of assessment, and books on assessment completely ignored this area of the school curriculum. With the introduction of the GCSE, Routes of Assessment (ROA) and the National Curriculum, assessment has become an important part of the teaching of PE. This book examines in detail the issues as they affect teachers.

This "how-to" book on formative assessment is filled with practical suggestions for teachers who want to use formative assessment in their classrooms. With practical strategies, tools, and examples for teachers of all subjects and grade levels, this book shows you how to use formative assessment to promote successful student learning.

In this valuable resource, well-known scholars present a detailed understanding of contemporary theories and practices in the fields of measurement, assessment, and evaluation, with guidance on how to apply these ideas for the benefit of students and institutions. Bringing together terminology, analytical perspectives, and methodological advances, this second edition facilitates informed decision-making while connecting the latest thinking in these methodological areas with actual practice in higher education. This research handbook provides higher education administrators, student affairs personnel, institutional researchers, and faculty with an integrated volume of theory, method, and application.