Written with faculty in mind, "Assessment by Design" is a practical resource that will also be useful to student affairs staff and administrators dedicated to using assessment to improve learning in curricular and co-curricular settings. This book presents the Cycle of Assessment as a framework that supports assessment in service of…

Building a better data culture can be the path to better results and greater equity in schools. But what do we mean by data? Your students are not just statistics. They aren't simply a set of numbers or faceless dots on a proficiency scale. They are vibrant collections of experiences, thoughts, perspectives, emotions, wants, and dreams. And taken…

What if there was a better way to collect and interpret assessment data that could strengthen the link between teaching and learning? "Student Assessment: Better Evidence, Better Decisions, Better Learning" is the innovative guide to show you how it is done and done right. This unique book offers a new assessment model focused on…

While there are many different types of education data, policymakers and education leaders often place heavy emphasis on data from large-scale quantitative measures, such as annual state assessments. But data from these sources alone do not provide a complete picture of learning and are often not well suited to informing improvements at the local…

It may seem obvious, but learning should never be implied or assumed. Learning must be explicit, evaluated and monitored; the impact of teaching on student learning should be visible. But how can we be sure? Armed with years of research that includes more than 2,100 meta-analyses, and 130,000 studies that include more than 300 million…

Adaptive teachers use student data to guide instruction. Learn about using an anecdotal record form to support adaptive teaching. In this article, the authors describe how teachers can use learning trajectories to make adaptive decisions to meet the needs of their students. They provide an example using the U .S. Math Recovery Council's learning…

The authors provide novice teachers with a step-by-step introduction to linguistic analysis, a tool to identify gaps between English learners' proficiency levels and the language demands of their coursework in the content areas.

This toolkit is designed to guide educators in developing and improving practical measurement instruments for use in networked improvement communities (NICs) and other education contexts in which principles of continuous improvement are applied. Continuous improvement includes distinct repeating processes: understanding the problem, identifying…

Education can be transformed if we eradicate our fixation on big data like standardized test scores as the supreme measure of equity and learning. Instead of the focus being on "fixing" and "filling" academic gaps, we must envision and rebuild the system from the "student" up--with classrooms, schools and systems…

Even under ideal conditions, teaching is tough work. Facing unrelenting pressure from administrators and parents and caught in a race against time to improve student outcomes, educators can easily become discouraged (or worse, burn out completely) without a robust coaching system in place to support them. For more than 20 years, perfecting such a…

Measurement systems give colleges a structure for collecting, sharing, and acting on data. The guidebook and tools presented here help faculty, staff, college leadership, and policymakers understand and use measurement systems--and specifically use data to improve completion rates, close institutional performance gaps, and facilitate economic…

Collaborative staff development in education is the vehicle to student success, and research shows that the closer professional learning is to daily practice, the more meaningful and impactful it will be. Written with deep respect for the work educators do in their classrooms each day, this practical resource illustrates the importance of…

Analyzing and interpreting data is essential to the practice of scientists and is also an essential science and engineering practice for science teaching and learning. Although working with data has benefits for student learning, it is also challenging, particularly with respect to aspects of work with data that are not yet very common in schools,…

Audience analysis is essential for creating successful messages across communication fields. The audience persona is an effective tool for understanding the characteristics and needs of a target audience. Through this unit activity, students experience the process of persona development, build skills in data collection and analysis, and gain…

Data collected in many biology laboratory classes are on ratio or interval scales where the size interval between adjacent units on the scale is constant, which is a critical requirement for analysis with parametric statistics such as t-tests or analysis of variance. In other cases, such as ratings of disease or behavior, data are collected on…