This is the important part for teachers to understand. We often think, or hear other complain, about every new idea being somethign new added to their workload. This is actually a purposeful planning of many concepts that you already employ, just being used for a more structured and planned purpose.

This is really where the Iowa/Common Core is taking us. How many teachers are going to be prepared with ways to measure how their students are progressing in problem solving before the students are being assessed with the new assessments? Since the new state assessments are supposed to emphasize these skills more, will more teachers need to use rubrics to meaure these skills rather than just thinking that rubrics are for judging the quality of writing or projects?

This is true at all levels of education, not just high school. How often had you had a student who was struggling on an assessment and after having the expectations explained to them in a different way completed it easily?

I would add to this, "..at a specific moment in time." One of my coworkers always brought this up during our PD meetings when we were covering grading philosophy. There is nothing to say that the student would recieve the same grade on the same assessment on a different day, or even at a different time that day.

I think that often teachers fail to think about both groups when designing assessments and using results. Oftentimes I think that teachers use the results to adapt their instruction, but fail to provide the student with the information necessary to adapt their learning.