This primer argues that effective formative assessment is essential to successfully implementing new college- and career-ready standards. It explains what formative assessment is, how it works in practice, and why it is critically important in fostering powerful pedagogy and 21st-century competencies. It then contrasts the purposes and uses of formative assessment with those of other forms of assessment in a comprehensive and balanced assessment system. It also offers recommendations for policymakers at state and local levels in how to support formative assessment, and not unintentionally undermine it. Ultimately, this primer argues for formative assessment’s central role in fostering a culture of learning for students and teachers.
Coherence: Key to Next Generation Assessment Success
In this Assessment and Accountability Comprehensive Center (AACC) policy brief, Joan L. Herman explains the significance of a coherent multi-assessment system and describes key considerations in developing such a system. Herman begins with a description of the need for assessments that are tightly coupled to learning goals. The author connects this discussion of assessments to a suggested approach to establish a system that includes horizontal, developmental, and vertical assessment coherence. Using detailed models and explanations, Herman’s approach to assessment involves close alignment between instruction, learning goals, and assessment tasks across all levels of the system, and one that is used to support learning for teachers, students, and leaders over a series of time points. The brief concludes with concise descriptions of different types of assessment and their corresponding uses.
READi (Reading, Evidence, and Argumentation in Disciplinary Instruction)
This resource highlights the work of the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd, and its correlation to the goals and vision of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), through a collaborative study with the University of Illinois at Chicago and others from 2010-2015. READi (Reading, Evidence, and Argumentation in Disciplinary Instruction) is engaging teachers to understand the cognitive processes that students will need to draw on in the course of developing evidence-based arguments, as well as to design the instructional interventions that will support students, and is designing research studies to measure the efficacy of the project interventions.
Focusing Formative Assessment on the Needs of English Language Learners
How can formative assessment enhance the teaching and learning of English language learner (ELL) students? What, if anything, from our experience with summative assessment of ELL students can inform effective formative assessment practices? And finally, what are the opportunities and challenges inherent in integrating formative assessment into instruction for ELL students in this era of Common Core and other next generation standards? This paper addresses these questions. In addition, the authors, all former or current WestEd researchers, argue that in order to use formative assessment effectively in classrooms with ELL students, teachers must attend simultaneously to the students’ needs both in learning content and skills, as well as in developing the English required to express their learning.
Assessment Literacy Webinar
The Assessment Literacy webinar provides guidance for middle and high schools that are attempting to ensure their assessment system is balanced and aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA/Literacy. The webinar focuses on the roles that formative, interim, and summative assessments serve in the instructional cycle. The webinar is broken into 4 sections:
What is Assessment Literacy?
CAASPP: Summative, Interim, and Formative Assessments
Formative Tools and Processes
Resources and Next Steps
The presenters, Gina Koency and Kathy Caric, use a variety of methods throughout the webinar that include reflective and discussion questions, multiple choice polls, reflection activities, quickwrites, video, detailed examples of the process of deconstructing standards, steps for developing lessons, and tips for student feedback.
Curriculum and Resources: The California History/Social Science Project at UC Irvine
Taken from the original website: “The California History/Social Science Project at UC, Irvine offers curriculum resources for K-12 history/social science teachers in the areas of content-based literacy, U.S. history, and world history. Our curriculum support for K-12 teachers, consists of supplemental curriculum handbooks, teacher training institutes in the fields of content-based literacy, American history, and world history, and suggested internet resources for advanced curriculum development.”