Assessment FOR Learning Ch 1,3

Notes from text
An Introduction to Student-Involved Assessment FOR Learning
Stiggins and Chappius

Chapter 1: Classroom Assessment for Success

[Students] assessed their own achievement repeatedly over time, so they could watch their own improvement.

[Students] continually see the distance closing between their present position and their goal...ongoing student- involved assessment, not for entries in the grade book, but as a confidence-building motivator and teaching tool.

Our assessments have to help us accurately diagnose student needs, track and enhance student growth toward standards, motivate students to strive for academic excellence, and verify student mastery of required standards.

Whatever else we do, we must help the, believe that success in learning is within reach.

Keys to Assessment Quality:
1. Clear Purposes
2. Clear Targets
3. Sound Design
4. Effective Communication

You must ask yourself, "Do I know what it means to do well? Precisely what does it mean to succeed academically?"

Chapter 3: Clear Achievement Expectations: The Foundation of Sound Assessment

Students can hit any target that they see and holds still for them.

Please realize that the path to academic success doesn't change as a function of how fast students travel it.

Types of Achievement Targets:
Knowledge (prerequisite to all other forms of achievement)
Reasoning (analytical, synthesizing, comparative, classifying, evaluative, inductive/deductive)
Performance Skills (to integrate knowledge and reasoning proficiencies and to be skillful)
Products (developing the capacity to create products that meet certain standards of quality)
Dispositions (attitudes, interests, motivation)

In the case of analytical reasoning, our instructional challenges are to be sure that students have the opportunity to master whatever knowledge and understanding they need to be able to analyze the things we want them to understand , and that they receive guided practice in exercising their analytical thought processes.

What do students need to come to know and understand in order to be ready to demonstrate that they can meet this standard when the time comes to do so?

What patterns of reasoning, if any, must they gain mastery of on their journey to this standard?

What performance skills, if any, are called for as building blocks beneath this standard?

What products must students become proficient at creating, if any, according to this standard?