This book contains necessary information to help teachers deal with the assessment concerns of classroom teachers. The major theme is that classroom assessment should help teachers make better educational decisions. Each chapter contains several elements intended to foster mastery of its contents, including a summary of contents, a more succinct statement of what teachers really need to know about the chapter's contents, self-check exercises and a key, questions designed to promote thinking abut the chapter's key concepts, and information about additional resources. Each chapter also contains a description of a fictitious teacher in a classroom situation related to one or more of the topics in the chapter. The following chapters are included: (1) "Why Do Teachers Need To Know about Assessment?"; (2) "Reliability of Assessment"; (3) "Validity"; (4) "Absence-of-Bias"; (5) "Deciding What To Assess and How To Assess It"; (6) "Selected-Response Tests"; (7) "Constructed Response Tests"; (8) "Performance Assessment"; (9) "Portfolio Assessment"; (10) "Affective Assessment"; (11) "Improving Teacher-Developed Assessments"; (12) "Instructionally Oriented Assessment"; (13) "Making Sense Out of Standardized Test Scores"; (14) "Appropriate and Inappropriate Test-Preparation Practices"; and (15) "Evaluating Teachers and Grading Students." (Contains 7 tables and 32 figures.) (SLD)