About This Title

"A powerful resource. The authors clarify the terminology of assessment with painstaking precision and offer specific, practical steps to help educators develop their assessment literacy."
—Richard DuFour, Educational Author and Consultant

"Highly recommended—a clear and helpful guide to navigating the terrain of instruction, assessment, and standards."
—Mike Schmoker, Author, Speaker, and Consultant

"A powerful way of coping with accountability. This important book lays out a game plan for coming up with an educationally defensible response to today's score-boosting pressures."
—W. James Popham, Professor Emeritus
UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

Common formative assessments—the centerpiece of an integrated, standards-based system!

Now you have powerful means to closely align curriculum, instruction, and assessment to the standards essential for student success. You will learn how teams of teachers in the same content area or grade level can collaboratively develop, test, and refine common formative assessments in order to gain reliable and timely feedback on student progress. The results provide teachers with critical insight into how well students are understanding the standards, what changes are needed in instructional strategies, and how to best meet the needs of every student!

This timely resource presents the "big picture" of an integrated, standards-based instruction and assessment system and offers instructional leaders and teacher teams guidelines for:

• Developing high-quality common formative assessments
• Aligning school-based common formative assessments with district benchmarks and large-scale summative assessments
• Predicting likely student performance on subsequent assessments in time to make instructional modifications
• Implementing and sustaining common formative assessments within the school’s or district’s assessment culture

This book is a must-read for all educators and leaders committed to improving standards-based assessment practices in their district, school, or classroom.