Teacher Designed Assessments to Promote Student Learning

Assessments drive instruction and learning. Teacher-designed assessments offer opportunities to address two major challenges inherent in teaching: (1) teacher mastery of standards-based curriculum, essential for teaching and assessment; and (2) teacher awareness of what students know and do not yet know, which is imperative for planning the next phase of instruction. Despite its importance, rather than composing assessments to advance student learning, many teachers rely on mediocre, ready-made Internet, textbooks, and teaching module assessments. You are reading this abstract, which suggests that you believe that teachers can design quality classroom assessments, if only they are shown how.

Educational research, past and current, lay a firm foundation upon which teachers might learn to compose exemplary assessments to target key content and high-level thinking. Teacher Designed Assessments to Promote Student Learningdeconstructs, simplifies, integrates, and illustrates research findings to demystify the process and guide the reader through evidence-based practices for creating dynamic assessments. To this end, the book is organized into chapters that progress from the basics and big ideas of assessment to detailed specifics for how to create all types of assessment tools.

Whether you use this book as a quick reference for specific topics or study the contents cover-to-cover, you will discover how to do the following:

• Translate standards into teachable, testable curriculum
• Compose assessments that are reliable, valid, and fair to all students
• Create high-quality essays and short answer tests
• Construct viable oral assessments
• Design true-false, multiple-choice, matching, and completion items to advance and assess high-level thinking
• Plan, facilitate, and assess project-based learning
• Craft rubrics, checklists, and rating scales

Equipped with step-by-step strategies, clearly illustrated best practices, and explicit examples and engaging tasks, you will gain the tools you need to make first-rate, teacher-made assessments a mainstay in your classroom and your school.