A blog about making all assessments actionable and useful for teaching and learning.
-
Synergizing Assessment with Learning Science to Support Accelerated Learning Recovery: Principled Assessment Design
A key aspect of formative assessment is that teachers collect and interpret samples of student work or analyze items to diagnose where students are in their learning. Busy teachers are faced with two choices. They can count the responses answered correctly by topic and move on; or stop, grab a cup of steaming hot coffee,…
-
A Reflection Based on “Leading a Competency-based Secondary School”
Two students and a teacher talking in the hallway.
-
Market Research as Context and Evidence to Support Innovation
Items along a test scale should show as red, green, and blue to denote a learning progression but in the graphic readers see the messy green and blue intermixing with no clear differentiation between the middle and advanced stage.
-
K-12 Accommodation Policies in a Digital Age: Is it Time for A Change?
In the space of two years, historical educational accommodation policies for K-12 students set at the state and federal level have become increasingly difficult to implement in practice. Why in many states might guidance that accommodations used when taking a statewide assessment be the same ones the student uses during typical classroom instruction and assessment…
-
From Multiple Choice to the Beyond!
Case Studies in English Language Arts: Part 2 In the first blog of this series, I argued that when teachers use multiple-choice items as the predominate way of measuring student learning, it is difficult (to near impossible) to uncover what students are thinking. Many students enter and exit their grade in roughly the same relative…
-
To Multiple Choice and Beyond!
Case Studies in English Language Arts: Part 1 As a teacher, how do you know if your students are on track for meeting the expectations for year-end performance in the state standards? During the year we may see that many students spend large amounts of time in a similar stage of learning whereas other students…
-
Why We Should use SLOs to Support Student Learning Recovery
Student learning objectives (SLOs) are intended to be a teacher-centered reflection process about supporting student learning over the course of a year or throughout the duration of a course. This is a particularly important process as we work to recover from and persist through continued learning disruptions as a result of the pandemic. Many teachers…
-
Synergizing Assessment with Learning Science to Support Accelerated Learning Recovery: Understanding by Design
In this third and culminating blog on the topic of synergizing assessment with learning science, I advocate that we unify our educational ecosystem through a common theory of learning to ensure we accelerate, recover, and personalize learning opportunities for each student. To accomplish this vision of what public education can and should look like, we…
-
Synergizing Assessment with Learning Science to Support Accelerated Learning Recovery: Preamble
Across the country, we see evidence that students are learning at slower rates than in years past, particularly in mathematics. For example, Curriculum Associates’ researchers found an additional 6% of students were not ready to access on-grade instruction in mathematics in Fall 2020 compared to historical trends. My former colleagues at NWEA found student achievement…
-
Creating Engaging Relationships with Students Online
Elise Ince University of South Carolina E-teaching requires learning new online skills: how to administer an exam from a distance, how to share documents, hold office hours, use Zoom, and poll students. To help teachers in this matter, one can count on your administration to provide a plethora of guidance, how to videos, and other…
Check out my book!
Actionable Assessments in the Classroom 