New Report: Assessment Systems that Support High-Quality Learning

Posted by on March 01, 2010

What a superlative student assessment system should look like

A white paper from the Council of Chief State School Officers considers what a student assessment system would entail if built from the best practices in current educational research and educational systems in the U.S. and high-achieving nations around the world. The paper suggests that any assessment process should support a range of purposes — informing learning and instruction, determining progress, measuring achievement, and providing partial accountability information. It must address the depth and breadth of standards as well as all areas of the curriculum, not just those easily measured. The needs of all students must be integral to its design process, and it should honor research indicating that students learn best when given challenging content and provided with assistance, guidance, and feedback on a regular basis. The assessment should use a variety of measures, instruments, and processes at the classroom, school, district, and state levels, and measures should be formative as well as summative. Teachers should score student work based on shared targets. In sum, the assessment should support students in acquiring higher-order thinking and performance skills, and support learning for students, educators, schools, and states.

See the paper: http://www.ccsso.org/publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=381