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A interesting post about the place and value of formative assessment. It includes a long, printable list of assessment strategies will help identify new ways to check for understanding and verify what students have learned.

"CAMPBELL Walsh was sick of waiting for his NAPLAN test results. ''I wanted to know how I'd done. It had already been about four months and I still hadn't got the results,'' says the year 5 student from Aitken Creek Primary in the outer Melbourne suburb of Craigieburn. "

"What Constitutes 'Rigour' in Our 21st-Century Educational Systems?"

@tomwhitby "Dell Computer has sponsored four education Think Tanks over the last year, or so, and I have been fortunate to participate in three of them...Each of the groups is given four to six general topics of concern in education to discuss for about forty-five minutes to an hour. Since the members are all invited guests, they are usually intelligent, passionate, and well-versed in aspects of education specific to their profession....Progress is being stymied by the 6 "P's". By this I am not referring to the military expression "Proper Planning Prevents P*ss Poor Performance". I am talking about Poverty, Profit, Politics, Parents, Professional development, and Priorities preventing progress in Public Education."

"This list of three types of assessment is intended only to stimulate thought....These three things - helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good - are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it's far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But asking students simple questions, far from measuring putative 'content knowledge', is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted."

Papers compiled by a group of concerned educators who are speaking out for many who are constrained from speaking publicly.

"It is not enough to teach students how to understand information and communications technology. At some point you are going to have to assess their knowledge and understanding. "

Welcome to the Assessment for Learning website. This site has been developed by Curriculum Corporation on behalf of the education departments of the States, Territories and Commonwealth of Australia.

an invaluable teachers' resource used for assessment within the VCE (Victoria) and the HSC (NSW). Developed by experienced teachers .. for internal assessment and end of year examinations. Professionally designed and delivered by email .. they save teachers time and effort while providing confidence that assessment is reliable, accurate and consistent with requirements specified by education authorities.

NAPLAN-style testing and reporting has failed in the United States by narrowing the curriculum and corrupting education standards, says a chief education adviser to the US President, Barack Obama. .. The US tests have been criticised for narrowing the curriculum to reading and maths and multiple-choice formats.

An extended interview with James Gee. The video is from the PBS Documentary Digital Media - New Learners Of The 21st Century.

A profile of almost 10,000 Australian school to help search for schools compare statistically similar schools, view school-level NAPLAN results, identify schools that are doing well and share successful strategies. This service is designed to support acce

Aim of this website is to quickly locate statistical and contextual information about schools and compare them with statistically similar schools across Australia.

Taking a test is not just a passive mechanism for assessing how much people know, according to new research. It actually helps people learn, and it works better than a number of other studying techniques.

So how to assess large numbers. Traditionally this been done through tests and exams which can be easily marked by assessors. Whilst these make the assessment process manageable for the tutors, they offer little more than a mark or grade to the students - since very often there is no feedback-feedforward loop associated with the grade. Also tests and exams are not the best assessment strategy for all situations and purposes.

"In conjuction with our partners in the Rethink Learning Now campaign, we have produced an ESEA Toolkit for you to use in making your voice heard around ESEA reauthorization."

IMAGINE AN assessment system in which teachers had a wide repertoire of classroom-based, culturally sensitive assessment practices and tools to use in helping each and every child learn to high standards; in which educators collaboratively used assessment information to continuously improve schools; in which important decisions about a student, such as readiness to graduate from high school, were based on the work done over the years by the student; in which schools in networks held one another accountable for student learning; and in which public evidence of student achievement consisted primarily of samples from students' actual schoolwork rather than just reports of results from one-shot examinations.

"While some education conferences are genuinely inspiring, others serve mostly to demonstrate how even intelligent educators can be remarkably credulous, nodding agreeably at descriptions of programs that ought to elicit fury or laughter, avidly copying down hollow phrases from a consultant's PowerPoint presentation, awed by anything that's borrowed from the business world or involves digital technology. Many companies and consultants thrive on this credulity, and also on teachers' isolation, fatalism, and fear (of demands by clueless officials to raise test scores at any cost). With a good dose of critical thinking and courage, a willingness to say "This is bad for kids and we won't have any part of it," we could drive these outfits out of business -- and begin to take back our schools."