Educative Assessment - Softcover

Wiggins, Grant P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0787908487 ISBN 13: 9780787908485

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 1998

Synopsis

Educative Assessment In this work, the author shows how to design new assessments: outlining the criteria for good assessment design, performance standards, and scoring rubrics. He also tackles such issues as grading and report cards, and fairness and bias in testing. Full description

About this title

Review:

"Provides more pragmatic advice and background (including extensive references) on active assessments." (Choice)

"Wiggins' newest book is rigorous and provocative, bringing to bear his understanding of teaching for understanding and its implications for performance-based assessment." (Knowledge Quest)

Grant Wiggins puts at once the current craze for 'assessment' of students on a higher, more commonsensical and moral ground. He brings the sharp eye of a philosopher and the constructive humility of a veteran teacher to the tasks of explaining what we must know about our students' knowing and what this means for practice. This is a constructively unsettling book on our attitudes about learning and about our all-too-familiar and challengeable habits of assessing for it. (Theodore R. Sizer, chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools)

"Through forceful, in-depth argument and diverse examples, Wiggins makes the most convincing case yet that school-based assessment should aim mainly to improve, rather than to audit, student performance. Thanks to his penetrating discussions of feedback, the relationship of formal designs to practice, teaching for understanding, and rubrics, this book should dispel common misconceptions and elevate both the understanding and practice of authentic assessment" (Fred M. Newmann, professor of curriculum and instruction, University of Wisconsin, Madison)

"Wiggins makes the most convincing case yet that school-based assessments should aim mainly to improve, rather than audit student performance. Thanks to his penetrating discussions of feedback, the relationship of formal design to practice, teaching for understanding, and rubrics, this book should dispel common misconceptions and elevate both the understanding and practice of authentic assessment." (Fred M. Newmann, professor of curriculum and instruction, University of Wisconsin, Madison)

"Linking curriculum and assessment is one of the most critical problems facing today's educators. Wiggins has given us an extraordinarily clear set of design principles to guide our practice. I recommAnd this book to curriculum designers, teachers, and administrators concerned with developing coherent curriculum resulting in improved student performance" "Educators engaged in writing and shaping curriculum should consider Wiggins' book a necessity to raise the quality of their efforts. His emphasis on critical design skills and his numerous practical examples makes this an accessible guide. Grant Wiggins is one of the most intelligent voices in the reform community. (Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, educational consultant, editor, and writer)

From the Back Cover:

Tests don't just test, they teach. In this book, Grant Wiggins outlines the design standards for performance-based assessments that promise students, no matter what their ability, clear and worthy performance targets, useful feedback, coaching, and the opportunity to progress toward excellence.
As practical as it is provocative, Educative Assessment furnishes the information needed to design performance-based assessments, craft performance tasks that meet rigorous educational standards, score assessments fairly, and structure and judge student portfolios. It also shows how performance assessment can be used to improve curriculum and instruction, grading and reporting as well as teacher accountability.
\x09In addition, the book includes numerous design templates and flowcharts, strategies of design and troubleshooting, and myriad examples of assessment tasks and scoring rubrics that Wiggins developed and repeatedly refined using feedback from clients in schools, districts, and state department of education.
Following the recommendations for educative assessment mapped out in this book can provide students with authentic tasks that simulate or replicate adult tasks and offer teachers and students useful feedback that can generate stellar classroom performance.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0787908487
• ISBN 13: 9780787908485
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 386