Cheryl van Tilburg's List: Assessment in Education

The Center for Greater Philadelphia - UPenn runs this site for people interested in using value-added assessment as an analysis tool for education. Good stuff.

Great story of how a seemingly good school with high overall test scores can receive an F for its quality rating. For parents who are satisfied that their children's school is doing fine because of general test scores (or because they live in a high SES neighborhood), this article is worth the read.

Interesting article that explores the difficulty of measuring school quality based on NCLB-era standardized tests alone (the "achievement model"). The authors recommend expanding measurement to include instruments that measure learning rates and "impact" rates. Cool.

From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette -- Pittsburgh's school distict officials now require teachers to grade using 50 percent as the floor, regardless of the scale used. Not the best article on the subject, but it's interesting to read the thoughts of educators and administrators on the topic of grading.

Seth Godin explores why change is so hard for organizations, concluding that it's because people who are competent under the organization's old regime fear losing that competency. He concludes, "It doesn't take a lot of time to change … to reinvent … or to redesign. No, it doesn't take time; it takes will. The will to change. The will to take a risk. The will to become incompetent – at least for a while."

Blogger Dydan lays down his three principles for assessing student work. The key: "A student's grade should reflect her current understnding of the course, not last month's, not her understanding when it was convenient for me to assess her." Hurray.

Blogger dy/dan spells out his method of assessing. He's a genius, and while teachers may quibble with individual elements of his method, no one can argue that Dan doesn't place the entire focus on student learning. He's thinking hard about assessment. More teachers should.

PISA tests not only domain knowledge, but also students' values and beliefs, according to this Brookings Institution study.