Assessment literacy

'On the other hand, if delivered well, "effective feedback" can boost learning by an extra nine months in an academic year.'

In this two-part series, theory and practice meet head on as education expert Professor Dylan Wiliam sets up an experimental school classroom. For one term, he takes over a Year 8 class at a secondary comprehensive to test simple ideas that he believes could improve the quality of our children's education.

Assessment as learning: where students develop an awareness of how they learn and use that awareness to adjust and advance their learning, taking an increased responsibility for their learning.

"I agree that a checklist approach, based on steps and acquisition of factual knowledge can inhibit intuition and creative expression of learning.  Yet rubrics that focus on depth of skills to build critical thinking can allow the flexibility necessary to create indwelling.  Admittedly, I've used both.  And I do think that a scaffold approach, one which guides students from a prescriptive structure to one that engenders more internally driven analysis can work.  The key, as we discussed in our twitter discussion, is to design the rubric to guide rather than prescribe and use it to have conversations with students about their process.  Because I value experiential learning, I also value rubric-revision.  A good rubric is one that changes each and every time it is used-- possibly during the process.  It both encourages and responds to student inquiry.  It points in a direction, not to a path.  And it allows the student to develop thinking and produce work that surpass expectations."

Employing standardized achievement tests to ascertain educational quality is like measuring temperature with a tablespoon. - Popham

A innovative tool for social reading and annotations.

"It is not a symbol of rigor to have grades fall into a 'normal' distribution; rather, it is a symbol of failure: failure to teach well, to test well, and to have any influence at all on the intellectual lives of students" (Milton et al. 1986, p. 225).

"Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding" is a 19-minute award-winning short-film about teaching at university and higher-level educational institutions.  It is based on the "Constructive Alignment" theory developed by Prof. John Biggs.  The film delivers a foundation for understanding what a teacher needs to do in order to make sure all types of students actually learn what the teacher intends. 

For high schools, but could be adapted for higher ed.

Slavin, Hurley, and Chamberlain (2003) have shown that activating students as learning resources for one another produces some of the largest gains seen in any educational interventions, provided two conditions are met. The first is that the learning environment must provide for group goals, so that students are working as a group instead of just working in a group. The second condition is individual accountability, so that each student is responsible for his or her contribution to the group, so there can be no "passengers."

In this two-part series, theory and practice meet head on as education expert Professor Dylan Wiliam sets up an experimental school classroom. For one term, he takes over a Year 8 class at a secondary comprehensive to test simple ideas that he believes could improve the quality of our children's education

Differentiate learning objectives

His website.