Assessment literacy

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.

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."

"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).