Tag: Assessment

I used to think I was too cool and progressive to give quizzes. But a quiz tells you whether students are learning what you think you are teaching them, quickly and precisely. It’s a perfect data-collection tool: If students learned what you wanted them to learn, they will answer the questions correctly. If they haven’t, they won’t, allowing you to provide targeted help to specific students based on which questions they get wrong. The only caveat is that you shouldn’t grade the quiz, because attaching a grade to a quiz ruins your data.

One sure way to build students’ abilities to drive their own learning is to involve them directly in the process of assessment.

There was one student in particular, who I’ll call “Alex.” He excelled in conversations with his peers and often shared his thoughts in class discussions, but his performance on written exams did not reflect the full depth of his understanding.

“Grading” for me means more than just marking mistakes and putting a number or letter on an assignment. This is because, for the last ten years, I have used specifications grading in all my classes.

How can assessment practices be designed to best support student learning? In school, the term “assessment” is often shorthand for “grades”—or, perhaps, tests, quizzes, rubrics, and similar evaluative tools. However, thinking of “assessment” as interchangeable with “test” or “grade” limits the potential for assessment practices to lead to meaningful and deeper learning.

"Creating a project-based curriculum in science was going to be a challenging albeit passionate undertaking."

We need to assess our resources before we can design online experiences. The online classroom...

I introduced critique to my class after reading Ron Berger’s manifesto, An Ethic of...

The challenge is to convince my diverse students (a representative ethnic and...

On the day of our second school-wide exhibition last year, a student’s words nearly...