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A collection of truly insightful musings on assessment, whether you teach math or something else.

Chris, I definitely think this process for assessment could be utilized in other disciplines quite easily. The idea of student ownership is a huge factor for motivating students. The parent involvement seems to be a positive aspect, too. Thank you so much for keeping us all aware of innovative practices happening in education. Karen Anderson

Lots of folks talk about authentic assessment. The terms seem obvious, but here is a good site by a professor in IL that goes into great detail trying to unravel this topic. Good resource for teachers to stimulate ideas around making assessments more relevant and authentic to students.

Ed Week blog article on what schools should do to be more proactive about training teachers in formative assessment.

Blog post from Technology Transformation.

I've honestly never considered this before. Whether you agree with the chart's conclusions is obviously open for discussion, but the chart left me thinking about specifically WHY we assign HW and what we should be doing about it.

Given technology, can homework be used as a means to (a) differentiate assessment, (b) have students demonstrate understanding via a different modality, (c) scaffold learning to further enhance the classroom experience. For a while, Howard Gardner experimented at Harvard with assigning his lectures as homework. Students watched videos and then came to class prepared to engage in discussion. Could a similar approach be taken at the high school level?

Chris: I think this flow chart is very interesting and worthy of considerable discussion. I like it. I would tweak it a bit. For example, I think you could (and should) give application homework that is formative as well as summative. I think all types of homework that fit with all six levels of Bloom's taxonomy could be given both formatively and summatively. The only homework that should be "graded" is homework that leads to end-of-learning assessment. If the homework is given in the process of learning, then it should not be graded but should receive feedback, both from the instructor as well as from the student(s).

Admittedly, peer grading is not the same as grading by an expert who really knows the material. But it is better than nothing! In fact, done conscientiously, using a well designed rubric, it's a lot better than you might think, particularly when the results are compared with grading by an instructor who has a large number of assignments to grade in a limited amount of time! In some studies, students were observed to learn better when they were asked to actively assess their answers and those of their peers according to the instructor's rubric. In particular, students who self-graded using a rubric outperformed students who were graded by instructors.

While watching a brilliant teacher in action, you too may have wondered: "What is it that makes them excellent?" Do we, as an educational community actually realise what makes a true teacher? Is it purely down to perfect pedagogy, rigorous planning and assessing, diligent resource making and clever behaviour management; or is there something more?

Educators weigh in on the question of whether homework is a worthy exercise for students.

Thank you for your interest in the CLA, the CWRA, and our Performance Task Academy workshops. The resources on this page are designed to more fully inform the presentation you attended, and to provide you with a comprehensive and well-rounded understanding of our services.If you have any questions after reviewing the contents of this page, please feel free to contact Chris Jackson, Director of Business Development, at 212.217.0845 or cjackson@cae.org.

Really good 20 minute introduction on E-Portfolio. Examples and clarification of this important work. Using E-Portfolios in secondary school as a way to have a student track his or her progress.

Add other resources in this group for e-portfolios. I think this is an interesting and exciting area of growth in classroom practice. More authentic forms of assessment.

A really interesting article. MUST READ. Clearly, not the definitive piece on this question. More research in both areas. Interesting about IQs increasing since 1900, but then very interesting that assessments that measure creativity show a substantial decline over the past 20 years.