Bo Adams's List: Assessment

• Wellington will have to compile another portfolio and defend its contents again as a senior in order to graduate. Called a performance assessment, the exercise is designed to gauge her readiness for college.
• Its project-based approach to instruction, relatively uncommon in U.S. schools, is well suited to the deeper learning the higher-level assessments can measure, according to school founder Bob Lenz.
• federal grant to counter plummeting enrollment by implement project-based learning, an approach in which students “learn by doing.” The change succeeded in revitalizing the school.

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• Education improvement efforts over the past two decades have focused primarily on articulating standards for student learning, refining the way we assess students' proficiency on those standards, and tying results to accountability. The one element still unaligned with these reforms is grading and reporting. Student report cards today look much like they looked a century ago, listing a single grade for each subject area or course.
• Is my purpose to select talent or develop it?
• Grades must always be based on clearly specified learning criteria. Those criteria should be rigorous, challenging, and transparent.
• teachers combine aspects of students' achievement, attitude, responsibility, effort, and behavior into a single grade that's recorded on a report card—and no one questions it.
• In determining students' grades, teachers typically merge scores from major exams, compositions, quizzes, projects, and reports, along with evidence from homework, punctuality in turning in assignments, class participation, work habits, and effort.
• Recognizing that merging these diverse sources of evidence distorts the meaning of any grade, educators in many parts of the world today assign multiple grades. This idea provides the foundation for standards-based approaches to grading. In particular, educators distinguish product, process, and progress learning criteria
• Product criteria
• Process criteria
• Progress criteria
• After establishing explicit indicators of product, process, and progress learning criteria, teachers in countries that differentiate among these indicators assign separate grades to each indicator.
• In this way, they keep grades for responsibility, learning skills, effort, work habits, or learning progress distinct from assessments of achievement and performance (Guskey, 2002b; Stiggins, 2008). The intent is to provide a more accurate and comprehensive picture of what students accomplish in school.
• Reporting separate grades for product, process, and progress criteria also makes grading more meaningful.
• The key to success in reporting multiple grades, however, rests in the clear specification of indicators related to product, process, and progress criteria.

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• The goal in her classroom is no longer points or grades, but mastery. Students are held accountable not for the maximum points total assigned to a homework set, but for mastery of the concepts it contains.
• Teaching and learning with an eye toward mastery of a defined list of competencies circumvents many of the pitfalls that points-based grading causes.