Assessing Student Learning in General Education
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Assessment Reconsidered: institutional effectiveness for student success
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Ensuring Quality and Productivity in Higher Education - An Analysis of Assessment Practices
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A Handbook on Measurement Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education
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Understanding by Design
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What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.
African Americans and Standardized Tests : The Real Reason for Low Test Scores
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With a surprisingly honest and hard-hitting approach, this scathing indictment of the modern black family postulates that a lack of appreciation for literacy in the African American household is the true cause of low scores on today's standardized tests. Arguing that television, video games, rap music, and sports are all distractions from much-needed study time, the discussion stresses the significance of literacy in a child's future and the importance of parental involvement toward shaping that future. In an educational climate where most of the blame for a child's poor performance is placed upon the teachers, the curricula, and the social structure of the schools, this discussion ultimately places the responsibility back in the hands of the family and offers them suggestions for improvement.
High Stakes Testing : Coping With Collateral Damage
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The federal government's No Child Left Behind Act has thrust high-stakes testing - its goals, methods, and consequences - into the educational limelight. The four-fold purpose of this book is to: describe the nature of high-stakes testing; identify types of collateral damage that have attended the testing programs; analyze methods different groups of people have chosen for coping with the damage and suggest lessons to be learned from the high-stakes-testing experience. The six groups of people whose coping strategies are inspected include: politicians and their staffs; educational administrators and their staffs; parents and the public; test makers and test administrators; teachers and students. Importantly, the author avoids aligning himself with the test-bashing rhetoric of those who oppose high-stakes testing, especially the No Child Left Behind Act.Key features of this outstanding new book include: illustrative cases. The book offers more than 350 cases of collateral damage from high-stakes testing--and people's coping strategies--as reported in newspapers over the 2002-2004 period. background perspectives. Part I examines the influence of high-stakes testing on: 1) what schools teach; 2) how student progress is evaluated; 3) how achievement standards are set; and 4) how test results are used. participant responses. Part II, which is the heart of the book, devotes a separate chapter to the coping strategies of each of the major participants in the high-stakes testing movement: politicians and their staffs, educational administrators and their staffs, parents and the public, test-makers and test-givers, teachers, and students. summary chapter. The last chapter (Lessons to Learn) offers suggestions for minimizing collateral damage by adopting alternative approaches not used in the creation of our current high-stakes testing programs, particularly the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act. This book is appropriate for any of the following audiences: students taking evaluation or administration courses in schools of education, inservice administrators and teachers, policy makers, and those members of the general public who are concerned about the fate of schooling in America.
Defending Standardized Testing
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The education reform movement of the past two decades has focused on raising academic standards. Some standards advocates attach a testing mechanism to gauge the extent to which high standards are actually accomplished, whereas some critics accuse the push for standards and testing of impeding reform and perpetuating inequality. At the same time, the testing profession has produced advances in the format, accuracy, dependability, and utility of tests. Never before has obtaining such an abundance of accurate and useful information about student learning been possible. Meanwhile, the American public remains steadfast in support of testing to measure student performance and monitor the performance of educational systems.Many educational testing experts who acknowledge the benefits of testing also believe that those benefits have been insufficiently articulated. Although much has been written on standardized testing policy, most of the material has been written by opponents. The contributing authors of this volume are both accomplished researchers and practitioners who are respected and admired worldwide. They bring to the project an abundance of experience working with standardized tests.The goal of Defending Standardized Testing is to:•describe current standardized testing policies and strategies;•explain many of the common criticisms of standardized testing;•document the public support for, and the realized benefits of, standardized testing;•acknowledge the limitations of, and suggest improvements to, testing practices;•provide guidance for structuring and administering large-scale testing programs in light of public preferences and the'No Child Left Behind Act'requirements; and•present a defense of standardized testing and a vision for its future.Defending Standardized Testing minimizes the use of technical jargon so as to appeal to all who have a stake in American educational reform.
Making the Grades : My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry
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In this alternately amusing and appalling exposé of the standardized test industry, fifteen-year veteran Todd Farley describes statisticians who make decisions about students without even looking at their test answers; state education officials willing to change the way tests are scored whenever they don't like the results; and massive, multi-national, for-profit testing companies who regularly opt for expediency and profit over the altruistic educational goals of teaching and learning.
More Than a Score : The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing
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Key participants in the growing movement of teachers, students, and parents organizing against high stakes testing.
Standardized Testing
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Standardized Testing: Books in this anthology series focus a wide range of viewpoints onto a single controversial issue, providing in-depth discussions by leading advocates, a quick grounding in the issues, and a challenge to critical thinking skills.
The Test : Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing - But You Don't Have to Be
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No sooner is a child walking and talking than the ABCs and 1-2-3s give way to the full-on alphabet soup: the ERBs, the OLSAT, the IQ, the NCLB for AYP, the IEP for ELLs, the CHAT and PDDST for ASD or LD and G&T or ADD and ADHD, the PSATs, then the ACTs and SATsall designed to assess and monitor a child's readiness for education. In many public schools, students are spending up to 28% of instructional time on testing and test prep. Starting this year, the introduction of the Common Core State Standards Initiative in 45 states will bring an unprecedented level of new, more difficult, and longer mandatory tests to nearly every classroom in the nation up to five times a yearforcing our national testing obsession to a crisis point. Taxpayers are spending extravagant money on these testsup to $1.4 billion per yearand excessive tests are stunting children’s spirits, adding stress to family life, and slowly killing our country’s future competitiveness. Yet even so, we still want our kids to score off the charts on every test they take, in elementary school and beyond. And there will be a lot of them. How do we preserve space for self-directed learning and development, while also asking our children to make the score and make a mark? This book is an exploration of that dilemma, and a strategy for how to solve it. The Test explores all sides of this problemwhere these tests came from, why they're here to stay, and ultimately what you as a parent or teacher can do. It introduces a set of strategies borrowed from fields as diverse as games, neuroscience, social psychology, and ancient philosophy to help children do as well as they can on tests, and, just as important, how to use the experience of test-taking to do better in life. Like Paul Tough’s bestseller How Children Succeed, it illuminates the emerging science of grit, curiosity and motivation, but takes a step further to explore innovations in educationemerging solutions to the over-testing crisisthat are not widely known but that you can adapt today, at home and at school. And it presents the stories of families of all kinds who are maneuvering within and beyond the existing educational system, playing and winning the testing game. You’ll learn, for example, what Bill Gates, a strong public proponent of testing, does to stoke self-directed curiosity in his children, and how Mackenzie Bezos, wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and mother of three, creates individualized learning experiences for each of her children. All parents want their children to be successful, and their schools to deliver true opportunities. Yet these goals are often as likely to result in stress and arguments as actual progress. The Test is a book to help us think about these problems, and ultimately, move our own children towards the future we want for them, from elementary to high school and beyond.
