21st Century Classroom Assessment Strategies

The authors advocate for strategies that shift assessment from quality control to quality assurance.

Grant Wiggins explains why teacher planning for learning provides a framework for "clarifying purposes and the best means of causing them, in order to achieve the most satisfying outcomes."

If the students don't recognize assessments as a chance to show their learning, then these things aren't even assessments; they're something altogether alien to real learning. Fortunately, there are many approaches we can take within our own classrooms to change this situation.

A table illustrating the characteristics of various assessment tools on a continuum from more structured / de-contexualized to less structured / more contextualized.

A table adapted from Student-Involved Assessment for Learning that gives a picture of how appropriate various assessment methods are for a variety of learning target types

School of the Future techniques for asking questions that promote student thinking and give you time to observe student understanding

This article explains three specific actions that we can take to improve our questions. To begin with, we need to get students talking rather than the teacher talking. Second, prepare the questions when you plan the lesson. And third, scaffold the questions.

Thirteen examples of how teachers have made feedback (as opposed to advice and evaluation) more central to their work with students.

To improve formative assessment practices among both teachers and assessment designers, we need to look more closely at just what feedback is-and isn't.

What would happen if the roles were flipped and students asked the questions?  Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana document a step-by-step process to help students formulate and prioritize questions about nearly everything.

Grant Wiggins discusses what rubrics are, how they are misused and how we can use them effectively.