This Table of Contents probably isn't what you expect-it's not a nice list of all major sections with page numbers. Since each section of Toolkit98 is numbered separately (so that it is easy to add, delete, and move material around without having to renumber the whole thing), this Table of Contents merely provides brief descriptions of chapters, activities, and appendices. The Introduction contains information on how to find what you want in Toolkit98. There is also a table of contents at the beginning of each chapter.
This chapter covers how to find what you want in Toolkit98-tabs, footers, chapter content and numbering, appendices, etc. It also includes Toolkit98 overview information-target audience, goals, etc.
Activity Intro.1 Toolkit98 Scavenger Hunt
Helps users to learn how to find what they want in Toolkit98. Time: 30-45 minutes
Activity Intro.2 Creating an Assessment Vision: Building Our Barn!
Assists participants to understand how assessment change occurs by having them view the necessary components of change. Time: 1½ to 2 hours
This is the "big picture" chapter-why careful attention to student assessment is crucial and how assessment activities fit into and support other current changes in education. It can also be thought of as the "awareness" chapter-introducing basic concepts, exploring current attitudes, and building a vision of what we want assessment to do for us.
Activity 1.1 Changing Assessment Practices-What Difference Does it Make for Students?
This activity stimulates thinking and discussion among teachers, parents, and diverse communities of learners about why assessment practices are changing. It is a good introductory activity. Time: 20-30 minutes
Activity 1.2 Clear Targets-What Types Are These?
In this activity, participants consider different types of learning targets for students, having a good mix of targets, and ensuring that learning targets are crystal clear. It is an intermediate level activity. Time: 4060 minutes
Activity 1.3 Post-it Notes™
This activity reviews assessment terminology and serves as a mixer. It uses the glossary in Appendix E, and is a good introductory activity. Time: 20 minutes
Activity 1.4 Seeing Wholes
This activity emphasizes the connection between assessment, curriculum, and instruction. It is a good introductory activity. Time: 20 minutes
Activity 1.5 Clapping Hands
Participants play the part of assessors and assessees to explore both the meaning of quality with respect to alternative assessment and why we all should care about quality. It is designed for educators at an intermediate level of study about assessment. Time: 75 minutes
Activity 1.6 A Comparison of Multiple-Choice and Alternative Assessment
Participants compare a multiple-choice test to an alternative assessment that attempts to measure the same skills, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. This is an introductory level activity which uses assessment samples in Appendix A. Time: 30-60 minutes
Activity 1.7 Target-Method Match
This activity introduces assessment methods, and gives participants practice in matching methods to learning targets. It is designed for educators at an intermediate level of study about assessment. Time: 60-90 minutes
Activity 1.8 Sam's Story: Comprehensive Assessment
This activity illustrates the need for multiple measures of student achievement. It is an introductory level activity. Time: 45 minutes
Activity 1.9 Going to School
Part A of this activity demonstrates the importance of performance criteria; Part B illustrates different types of performance criteria, and Part C discusses the advantages and disadvantages of various types of rubrics. The activity uses assessment samples in Appendix A. Part A is an intermediate activity; Parts B & C are advanced. Time: 60 to 90 minutes
Activity 1.10 Clear Targets and Appropriate methods-The View From the Classroom
Participants self-evaluate the extent to which their instruction is focused on clear targets and the degree of conscious matching they perform between targets and assessment methods. Self-rating rubrics are provided. This activity is intermediate in difficulty. Time: 30-45 minutes
Activity 1.11 Assessment Standards
This activity provides an opportunity for participants to look at assessment standards in various content areas and related examples of assessment questions. It is an intermediate level activity. Time: 90 minutes
Activity 1.12 Assessment Principles
Participants examine the beliefs that influence their decisions about student assessment and explore equity issues in assessment. It is an introductory activity. Time: 20 minutes
This chapter considers the ways assessment influences teachers, instruction, and students. Such consideration is essential if we want to build an assessment system based on a clear vision of what we want assessment to accomplish.
Activity 2.1 Sorting Student Work
This activity is at an intermediate level of difficulty and involves sorting samples of student work into three stacks representing "strong," "medium," and "weak" responses to a performance task. Participants have the opportunity to describe and discuss the characteristics of work that differentiate these stacks. This is an exercise in developing performance criteria, but it also demonstrates how developing performance criteria can help sharpen understanding of the goals held for students, increase teacher expertise, and assist students with understanding how to produce high quality work. The activity includes a description of the steps for developing performance criteria, using self-reflection letters as a running example. The activity uses samples of student work in Appendix B, and sample assessments from Appendix A. Time: 75-120 minutes
Activity 2.2 How Can We Know They're Learning?
This beginning level activity is an adaptation for parents of Activity 2.1. Parents have the opportunity to sort student work and distinguish for themselves the characteristics that make it more or less strong. The activity also helps parents understand changes in assessment and why they are occurring. It uses sample assessments from Appendix A. Time: Part A, 75-90 minutes; Part B, 30-40 minutes
Activity 2.3 Ms. Toliver's Mathematics Class
In this activity, using a video, a teacher demonstrates how she conducts continuous monitoring of student achievement and implements standards-based assessment. It is designed for educators at an intermediate level in their study of assessment. Time: 1½ to 2½ hours
Activity 2.4 Is Less More?
Participants experience an integrated, interactive, standards-based mathematics and science lesson and consider the implications of such a lesson for student assessment. It is designed for educators at an intermediate level in their study of assessment. Time: 2 hours
Activity 2.5 How Knowledge of Performance Criteria Affect Performance
This activity illustrates the importance of performance criteria in helping students understand the requirements of an assignment or task, and illustrates what can happen when criteria for judging success are not clearly understood by students. It is designed for educators at an intermediate level in their study of assessment. Time: 30-45 minutes
While Chapters 1 and 2 strive to develop overall visions of the role of assessment in instruction and the implications of purpose for how assessments are designed, Chapter 3 begins the detailed examination of design options and related quality considerations. What do some of the current assessments look like? When should we use various design options? How does assessment purpose relate to design options? What do high quality alternative assessments look like?
Activity 3.1 Performance Tasks-Keys to Success
This advanced level activity illustrates the dimensions along which performance tasks differ and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. It uses example assessments from Appendix A. Time: 60 to 90 minutes
Activity 3.2 Spectrum of Assessment Activity
Part A of this activity asks participants to review Bloom's Taxonomy and develop assessment questions and tasks that tap different levels. In Part B, participants review a variety of short, related assessment tasks and rank them according to the type of skills and knowledge each might elicit from students. The goal is to design tasks that really assess desired learning targets. This is an advanced level activity. Time: Part A, 90 minutes to 2 hours; Part B, 90 minutes
Activity 3.3 Performance Criteria-Keys to Success
This advanced level activity illustrates the characteristics of sound performance criteria. It uses assessment samples from Appendix A. Time: 60-90 minutes
Activity 3.4 Assessing Learning: The Student's Toolbox
This intermediate activity illustrates the relationship between different ways to design assessment tasks and the student learning to be assessed. Time: 20-30 minutes (variation takes 45-60 minutes)
Activity 3.5 Performance Tasks and Criteria: A Mini-Development Activity
In this advanced level activity, participants discuss how good assessment equals good instruction and the issues in using and designing performance assessments. Participants use assessment samples from Appendix A. Time: 2-3 hours
Activity 3.6 How to Critique an Assessment
In this advanced level activity, participants practice aligning assessment and instruction and evaluating a performance assessment for quality. Time: 1-2 hours
Activity 3.7 Chickens and Pigs: Language and Assessment
This introductory level activity emphasizes the critical role that language plays in effective and equitable assessments. Time: 10-20 minutes
Activity 3.8 Questions About Culture and Assessment
This introductory level activity increases awareness of the relationship between culture and assessment by demonstrating how cultural factors can affect student ability to show what they know and can do. Time: 90 minutes
Activity 3.9 Tagalog Math Problem
This introductory level activity illustrates how lack of knowledge of a language can affect performance on skills that have nothing to do with language understanding (like math). Time: 20-30 minutes
Teachers at all grade levels are currently feeling a certain amount of discomfort about the manner in which (either by choice or by district policy) they have assigned grades. There is a sense that something has to change, but no-one is really sure what needs to change to or even how to productively frame the questions to be addressed. No one currently has the answer. However, in this chapter, we provide ideas-current best thinking about the issues that have to be addressed and how others have addressed these issues in redesigning grading and reporting systems.
Activity 4.1 Weighty Questions
This advanced level activity helps to illustrate the importance of developing sound grading practices that reflect valued student learning targets. Time: 90 minutes to 2 hours; extension, 60 minutes
Activity 4.2 Putting Grading and Reporting Questions in Perspective
This intermediate level activity provides an opportunity for teachers to express their current questions and concerns about grading and relate them to three levels of concerns about grading proposed in a paper by Alfie Kohn in Appendix C. Time: 75 to 90 minutes
Activity 4.3 Grading Jigsaw
This intermediate level activity raises and promotes discussion about issues surrounding grading. It uses papers on grading and reporting in Appendix C. Time: 1 ½ to 2 ¼ hours
Activity 4.4 Won't Some Things Ever Change?
In this intermediate level activity, participants compare and critically examine the messages sent by report cards from 1916, 1943, 1965, and 1994. Time: 30-40 minutes.
Activity 4.5 Report Card Formats
This advanced level activity provides examples of innovative report card formats and promotes discussion of their relative advantages and disadvantages. Time 40-75 minutes
Activity 4.6 How To Convert Rubric Scores to Grades
In this advanced level activity, participants discuss the advantages and disadvantages of four procedures for converting rubric scores to grades. This case study focuses on writing. Time 60-75 minutes
Activity 4.7 Case of the Killer Question
This advanced level activity presents the real-life grading dilemmas faced by an alternative high school. The killer question is: "How do we capture and report the learning of our students without compromising the integration, authenticity, student autonomy and self-directed learning that's at the heart of our program?" Time: 1 ½ to 2 ¼ hours
Activity 4.8 Guidelines for Grading
This advanced level activity presents eight guidelines for grading taken from current research. Participants consider each guideline in light of the goals they have for grading. Time 1 ½ to 2 hours.
Activity 4.9 Grading Scenarios
This advanced level activity presents real-life grading dilemmas for discussion. Time: 90 minutes
Appendix A contains material from 48 different assessment projects. Samples cover all grade levels and several content areas-reading, writing, social studies, mathematics and science. All samples have copyright clearance to use in training.
Appendix B has samples of student responses to various performance assessment tasks. A variety of grade levels and subject areas is represented. All samples have copyright clearance to use in training.
Appendix C contains several papers and articles about grading and reporting. All papers have copyright clearance to use in training.
Appendix D provides sample training agendas and vignettes showing how others have used Toolkit98 activities. Appendix D also includes sample Toolkit98 and training evaluation forms.
Appendix E provides a list of assessment-related words and what we've agreed they mean.