CTAP4 Data Assessment

Article by Rick Stiggins.

Most teachers routinely develop and communicate to students and parents the various plans and policies that govern the middle school classroom. Usually, this includes a classroom management plan, a grading policy, an instructional plan linked to state and district curriculum standards, a homework policy, and perhaps an intervention plan detailing what will happen for students if they fall behind.\n\nRarely do teachers include a classroom assessment plan. Most teachers typically don't develop this plan because it has been our history to see assessment as a series of isolated testing events: tests given at the end of an instructional unit or time period, like the end of a semester. However, as it turns out, students achieve at higher levels when teachers think more deeply about how their classroom assessments fit into their larger instructional environment.

These materials are for school board members who want to know more about how to use data to make good decisions for children in public schools. Trainers who work with school board members also can use these materials at state and national conferences or in local training sessions.

There is a significant difference between differentiated instruction and differentiated curriculum. Tracking is dedicated to the later. Differentiated instruction is not just clustering all students with similar learning needs into one group and providing them with different curriculum, but rather it requires giving students who are struggling to learn the essentials more time, more support, and new learning experiences with different strategies and different structures such as small-group instruction and individual tutoring.

Well before the idea of using data to manage schools gained prominence on the national stage, Oklahoma's Western Heights school district had made the ideal of real-time, data-driven decisionmaking a reality. Back in 2001, Superintendent Joe Kitchens was already being spotlighted for his focus on creating a longitudinal-data system that would give teachers in the 3,400-student district the ability to make quick decisions to improve student learning, while reducing the time spent compiling reports.