Product Description
Are students well prepared to meet the challenges of the future?Parents, students, the public and those who run education systems need to know whether children are acquiring the necessary skills and knowledge to become tomorrow's citizens and to cont ... Read more

Product Description
This book is based on the argument that detailed and developmental formative feedback is the single most useful thing teachers can do for students. It helps to clarify the expectations of higher education and assist all students to achieve their potential.

This book promotes student learning through formative assessment and feedback, which:

• enables self-assessment and reflection in learning
• encourages teacher-student dialogue
• helps clarify what is good performance
• provides students with quality information to help improve their learning
• encourages motivation and self-confidence in students
• aids the teacher in shaping teaching

Underpinned by the relevant theory, the practical advice and examples in this book directly address the issues of how to motivate students to engage in formative assessment effectively and shows teachers how they can provide further useful formative feedback.

Customer Reviews (1)

Great Book
The book is perfect for my research on online tutoring. Helped me a lot, mainly with formative feedback process. I recommend. ... Read more

Product Description
This casebook is intended to support professionals who are working in a variety of contexts to use classroom-based assessment more effectively to support teacher learning and teaching change, and to enhance the opportunities for all students to develop mathematical power. It grows out of a collaboration of mathematics teachers and teacher educators, and mathematicians, to better understand the role of assessment as an ongoing activity to help teachers reshape their own teaching practices. At the heart of each case is using assessment to make sense of what students understand and what they are confused about, deciding what counts as evidence of that understanding, and using the analysis to consider what the teacher's next instructional moves might be.

All of the cases in this volume are built around actual episodes from mathematics classrooms. Intended as decision-making exercises, they present the raw data of classroom events in a straightforward way and are designed to stimulate analysis and reflection; provoke various and sometimes conflicting interpretations of an event; bring to the fore deeply held beliefs of beginning and experienced teachers so they can be reconsidered; and engage professionals in pedagogical problem solving in the context of complex classroom settings.

This volume reflects the growing interest in cases as a pedagogical tool in teacher professional development. The cases are organized to take up key themes of the NCTM Professional Teaching Standards in ways that will assist and support teachers, teacher educators, and curriculum and staff development specialists in learning to assess and in linking assessment with curriculum, teaching, and learning. Although each case contains many ideas for linking assessment with curriculum and instruction, the most powerful use of these materials resides in their design intended to foster conversations among groups of professional colleagues. The editors' field-testing of the cases--in initial teacher certification courses and in in-service workshops--has shown that they prompt engaging and demanding analysis through a variety of analytic lenses.

A videotape containing vignettes for four of the cases in the Casebook is available with this book. Transcriptions of the video vignettes are printed in the case materials in the book. Course instructors and professional development facilitators will need both the Casebook and the videotape and should order the Casebook/Video set. The video can also be ordered separately.
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Product Description
U.S. public schools are responsible for educating large numbers of English language learners and students with disabilities. This book considers policies for including students with disabilities and English language learners in assessment programs. It also examines the research findings on testing accommodations and their effect on test performance. "Keeping Score for All" discusses the comparability of states policies with each other and with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) policies and explores the impact of these differences on the interpretations of NAEP results. The book presents a critical review of the research literature and makes suggestions for future research to evaluate the validity of test scores obtained under accommodated conditions. The book concludes by proposing a new framework for conceptualizing accommodations. This framework would be useful both for policymakers, test designers, and practitioners in determining appropriate accommodations for specific assessments and for researchers in planning validity studies. ... Read more

Product Description
In this book, Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick have assembled a collection of writings by outstanding educators who have taken up the challenge of improving assessment in their schools. They approach their task from a relatively new perspective, one informed byPeter Senge's concept of the "learning organization" and by the late W. Edwards Deming's concept of total quality management through continuous improvement of processes.

The chapter authors--all of them practicing educators--relate strategies from their districts, reflect on personal experiences with students in their classrooms and schools, and share insights they've gained in working to create a renaissance in assessment. In doing so, they describe how assessment is related to many of the practices advocated by Senge and Deming:

- Bringing congruence and integrity to organizational goals and assessments through systems thinking.
- Using feedback spirals to promote continual learning.
- Changing existing mental models for the role of assessment in schools.
- Stating purposes and outcomes in the form of a shared vision.
- Using team building and critical friends as resources for continual learning.
- Identifying a developmental continuum that helps teachers and learners set milestones along the pathways to personal mastery.

This book not only provides practical examples of ways to immediately improve assessment in your own classroom, school, or district, it also explains the theories on which you can build your own effort to continually improve assessment processes--and thus make your school a true learning organization. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

decided not to sell
I am upset with this company for not being able to ship this item.They cancelled my order.

Worthwhile to good administrators and teacher leaders.
The problem with modern day educationalists is that the field is so bereft of any true intellectual prowess authors feel they must write with arcane wording so as to bolster their own egos.For instance, Chapter one is titled "Systems Thinking: Interactive Assessment in Holonomous Organizations."Huh?Do they editors actually believe using `holonomous' in a title will connect them to their readers?This is the most egregious example, but be warned, the text, a collection of essays introduced by Costa and Kallick, is peppered with such muddled wording it makes the readings nearly useless to the teaching practitioner.I have the feeling that the editors are more concerned with how they are perceived by their peers than whether they deliver meaningful material to education students.Teachers will get the feeling that Costa and Kallick are, in typical PhD stereotyping, too far removed from the classroom environment.The essays following the editors' introductions are hit-and-miss yet will resonate in some ways; these essays generally give practical examples from teachers and principals for the themes the editors have provided.In all, college professors will be quite enamored with the text, yet teachers will find the writing style pompous and not genuine. ... Read more

Product Description
This practical book provides diagnostic information accompanied by explicit procedures for more than seventy instructional techniques drawn from multiple perspectives and applicable for use with all young learners. The book is constructed in two parts: Part One explains the diagnostic teaching process; Part Two delineates the instructional techniques. Each technique's presentation includes a description, step-by-step procedures, and detailed information on how and why to use it. The emphasis throughout is on encouraging teachers to continually reflect on their instructional practices and to tailor their instruction to the strengths and needs of the children they teach. For teachers of reading. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Not sure if the author really said ANYTHING in the first section
The only reason I am keeping this book is the second section includes over 100 ideas to use in the classroom for reading and writing and reasons for using each.These are a good place for teacher to get ideas to make quality, creative lessons, definitely not a substitution for real lesson plans.
The first section of the text was so redundant and simplistic while using heavy vocabulary for no reason.The author seemed to rely so heavily on vocabulary while failing to include any real context.It was a boring read that taught me nothing.I hope I never have to read another of Barbara Walker's books again.It was difficult to dissect the pointless banter to discover what, if any, point was being made.

Diagnostic Teaching of Reading Techniques for Instruction and Assessment
The book was the one that I exactly needed for my Master's Class, it is very useful and very informative for the reading program.

Not as bad as most text books...
This book is really easy to read and easy to follow.For a text book it's quite good.I had to buy the book for a class, but the book could have been much, much worse. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection--taken from the International Performance Assessment System (IPAS) developed by the Center for Performance Assessment--responds to teachers' needs for effective standards-based classroom assessments and provides teachers with practical tips and timesaving tools. The middle school edition targets grades 6-8, and each assessment in this book is linked with National Standards. ... Read more

Book Description
Educators and policy makers in the United States have relied on tests to measure educational progress for more than 150 years. During the twentieth century, technical advances, such as machines for automatic scoring and computer-based scoring and reporting, have supported states in a growing reliance on standardized tests for statewide accountability.

State assessment data have been cited as evidence for claims about many achievements of public education, and the tests have also been blamed for significant failings. As standards come under new scrutiny, so, too, do the assessments that measure their results. The goal for this workshop, the first of two, was to collect information and perspectives on assessment that could be of use to state officials and others as they review current assessment practices and consider improvements. ... Read more