This book examines, through case studies of elementary and secondary schools, how five schools have developed “authentic,” performance-based assessments of students’ learning, and how this work has interacted with and influenced the teaching and learning experiences students encounter in school. This important and timely book reveals the changing dynamics of classroom life as it moves from more traditional pedagogy to one that asks students to master intellectual and practical skills that are eminently transferable to “real-life” social settings and workplaces. “The issue of assessment comes first, but we see in the following case studies how it becomes powerfully enveloped in the processes of learning and teaching, of informing students, teachers, parents, and others of ‘how the children are doing.’ The portraits explicitly and implicitly suggest a deep, fair, and defensible way to answer the question ‘How’m I doing?’ in a manner that helps this child and eventually every child.” —From the Foreword by Theodore R. Sizer “Informative and thought provoking.” —American Journal of Education

This engaging book will show you how to move beyond tests and essay writing to implement authentic assessments in your middle or high school social studies classroom. Award-winning teacher David Sherrin explains the value of authentic assessments and offers practical ways to get started and dive deeper in your own practice. You’ll be encouraged and inspired by the real-life stories of classroom successes and failures that illustrate the points throughout the book. The chapters cover a range of categories, including different types of written, creative, and civic action assessments. The book includes: planning charts and rubrics showing how to use, grade, and give feedback on assessments so they truly aid student learning and progress specific examples, useful tips, and ready-to-go instructions that you can use immediately with your class open-ended assessments encourage scaffolding or adaptation for individual or group work to fit your classroom needs You will learn how to personalize instruction and provide students with avenues for creativity and the types of learning experiences they need to be prepared for a complex world.

Authentic Assessment combines performance tasks that are relevant to students' lives with the need for accountability. The book explores common mandated language arts expectations and shows teachers how to choose meaningful activities that will guide students toward achieving important learning outcomes. This practical approach to task design includes suggestions for planning through evaluating and generating a mark, as well as sensible ways to use assessment results to improve instructional practice. The book presents: a thorough, constructive background for authentic assessment of student work; clear definitions of terms related to assessment and evaluation; a step-by-step process for developing performance-based tasks; strategies for relating tasks to goals and expectations; numerous activities that can be used as is or adapted for specific needs. Designed for the busy teacher, the book includes ready-to-copy and use planning sheets, rubrics, and student surveys. Excellent samples of student work based on performance tasks complement this timely book.

Classroom Assessment in Action clarifies the multi-faceted roles of measurement and assessment and their applications in a classroom setting. Comprehensive in scope, Shermis and Di Vesta explain basic measurement concepts and show students how to interpret the results of standardized tests. From these basic concepts, the authors then provide clear and ordered discussions of how assessment and instruction is integrated into a functional process to enhance student learning. Guidelines are set forth for constructing various common assessments. Procedures are laid out to evaluate and improve assessments once they are constructed. Ultimately, the authors shed light on the myriad of factors that impact test score interpretation. In today's classroom, technology has become a constant companion, and Classroom Assessment in Action exposes teacher candidates to emerging technologies they might encounter in building their repertoire of assessments, whether it be automated essay scoring or electronic portfolios. Classroom Assessment in Action guides its readers to a complete and thorough understanding of assessment and measurement so that they can confidently work with students and parents in explaining results, whether they are from a high-stakes statewide assessment or the grading philosophy to which they ascribe.

Within today’s digital world, students intuitively acquire vast amounts of information at the touch of a screen or the tap of a keyboard. Learners in the information age long for more than activities that simply encourage the accumulation of additional knowledge. In fact, students come to class intuitively knowing how to gain a variety of information. Educational opportunities that transition students from consumers of information to creators of new learning experiences indelibly impact them in ways that transfer beyond the walls of the classroom. Today’s learners naturally and consistently consume, create, and publish content on their own time. Educators within the digital age leverage this creative potential when they allow and even encourage students to tap into their propensity for innovation in class. In an age in which far too few students understand how to effectively apply digital literacy or safety as they explore and generate content, today’s educators hold the potential for far-reaching impact. Educators must learn to harness the enthusiasm students have for content creation (and particularly digital content creation) into everyday assessment opportunities. In doing so, they position themselves to enhance student engagement, motivation, and achievement in academic contexts. Authentic Assessment in Action: An Everyday Guide for Bringing Learning to Life through Meaningful Assessment is designed to empower educators to provide highly impactful, consistently engaging, and unquestionably applicable learning opportunities for students.

Authentic Assessment in Action: Studies of Schools and Students at Work examines, through case studies of elementary and secondary schools, how five schools have developed "authentic," performance-based assessments of students' learning, and how this work has interacted with and influenced the teaching and learning experiences students encounter in school. This important and timely book reveals the changing dynamics of classroom life as it moves from more traditional pedagogy to one that asks students to master intellectual and practical skills that are eminently transferable to "real-life" social settings and workplaces. This book will be important reading for practitioners, professors, and researchers of curriculum and instruction and educational policy and will serve as a supplementary text in pre- and in-service courses in elementary and secondary curriculum development, curriculum and teaching, school organizations, educational leadership, educational policy and implementation.

Educators strive to create “assessment cultures” in which they integrate evaluation into teaching and learning and match assessment methods with best instructional practice. But how do teachers and administrators discover and negotiate the values that underlie their evaluations? Bob Broad’s 2003 volume, What We Really Value, introduced dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) as a method for eliciting locally-informed, context-sensitive criteria for writing assessments. The impact of DCM on assessment practice is beginning to emerge as more and more writing departments and programs adopt, adapt, or experiment with DCM approaches. For the authors of Organic Writing Assessment, the DCM experience provided not only an authentic assessment of their own programs, but a nuanced language through which they can converse in the always vexing, potentially divisive realm of assessment theory and practice. Of equal interest are the adaptations these writers invented for Broad’s original process, to make DCM even more responsive to local needs and exigencies. Organic Writing Assessment represents an important step in the evolution of writing assessment in higher education. This volume documents the second generation of an assessment model that is regarded as scrupulously consistent with current theory; it shows DCM’s flexibility, and presents an informed discussion of its limits and its potentials.