Classroom Assessment

This is a book about students and teachers: student learning and effective teaching. It isnota textbook about how to give tests and grades. Done well, assessment can help students learn complex and important ideas and develop the knowledge and skills they need to evaluate and improve their work long after they leave your classroom. Done poorly, assessment can inflict lifelong damage to students' curiosity, their images of themselves, and their opportunities in the future. In short, assessment has the power to do tremendous good or tremendous harm. Our goal in this book is to help teachers and other educators understand this power and use it wisely and ethically. SUPPORTING TEACHING AND LEARNING IN REAL CLASSROOMS In this book, we show how assessment plays a central role in the everyday lives of teachers. From planning instruction, to listening to students as they struggle and explore, to deciding the composition of small groups, to communicating the results of assessments to students, parents, and others, teachers use assessment every day of their professional lives. Throughout the book, we provide examples based on the assessment experiences of teachers with whom we have worked and students we have known. We show how teachers can effectively use assessment to support the learning of increasingly diverse groups of students, from kindergarten through high school (and beyond). We consider the impact of assessment decisions and practices on student learning and motivation and on the experiences of students with different abilities. This is a book about assessment with a heart. We have organized the book around our philosophy as teachers and teacher educators. Many textbooks on assessment begin with information about how to create test items and tests, but we begin with a focus onwork worth doing.Real work is at the center of this book--work that helps students understand why they learn what they learn. Just as a piano teacher teaches beginners to play songs at the same time they are learning chords and scales, we ask you to think about real applications of knowledge and skills before thinking about assessing the parts of the whole. TEXT ORGANIZATION AND SPECIAL FEATURES Section 1: The Role of Assessment in Supporting Teaching and Learning In the first section of the book, we introduce you to a new way of thinking about assessment in your classroom. This section introduces you to some of the important concepts and content of this book, and it tells you about our philosophy of assessment. The text does not present a collection of separable skills to be memorized and forgotten. We hope to convince you that by learning this material you can be a more effective teacher--one who is more successful at helping students learn, and who is able to argue effectively for your own philosophy of assessment. In Chapter 1, we orient you to a way of thinking about assessment that is grounded in the belief that all valid assessments can be used to support teaching and learning. We explain why educators must move beyond a view of assessment as something that happens only on tests to a position in which assessment is a natural, indeed inseparable, part of good teaching. In this chapter, we describe the book's organization, including concepts and themes that you will find throughout the book. We describe general considerations for assessing students with special needs, including those with disabilities and those who are still learning to speak and write in English. In Chapter 2, we elaborate on the role of valid assessment in effective teaching. We begin at the beginning of a teacher's work: deciding what is most important for students to learn. Unless you have a clear sense of what is most important, you cannot effectively plan for instruction or assessment. We share resources for making these important decisions and show you how to construct learning goals and objTaylor, Catherine S. . is the author of 'Classroom Assessment', published 2004 under ISBN 9780130974273 and ISBN 0130974277.