Assessment Tools
Making sense of the enormous amount of student data in any classroom or school is probably the biggest challenge we face individually and in our school communities. Here you'll find everything from one-page templates created by teachers for use in their classrooms to videos of staff teams poring over large data sets. We don't have all the answers, but we do provide tools to help you ask better questions as you evaluate students and talk about assessments with your colleagues.
Latest Content
Know/Wonder Chart
Dana Murphy shares the power of a Know/Wonder chart to peek inside the minds of intermediate readers and provide direction beyond assessment data.
Creating a Teacher Notetaking System
Dana Murphy, a reading specialist, guides all teachers in ways to develop a notetaking system that works perfectly because it is personalized.
It’s Time to Admire: Sharing in the Beauty of Students’ Writing
Heather Fisher shares a process to help teachers learn to admire student writers and find the beauty in their work.
Level Two Unlocked: Using the Language of Video Games to Engage Students in the Assessment Experience
Heather Fisher considers the research behind gamified experiences and applies it to a lengthy first-grade phonics assessment. Heather challenges us to gamify assessments to maintain the integrity of the assessment while increasing student engagement.
One-Page Reading Response: A Simple Approach to Complex Assessment
Christy Rush-Levine uses one-page reading responses as a simple culminating activity to provide closure for book clubs. However, the data they offer about readers is far from simple.
Getting to Know Digital Learners: How Playing with Technology Helps Facilitate Our Identities as Learners
As teachers we do many things to get to know our students as readers and writers and mathematicians. Josie Stewart and Hannah Tills lead us to consider how to get to know our students as digital learners.
Student-Planned End-of-Year Celebration
Josie Stewart and Hannah Tills know the end of the school year is full, yet they take the time to reflect and celebrate what learners have built throughout the year by asking students to create a plan for a final celebration.
Creating Progressions to Meet Learners Where They Are
Tara Barnett and Kate Mills share how to create and use learning progressions to support students in deepening their understanding of theme. Download a copy of a theme progression.
Mining the Data
Heather Fisher shares how to rebrand data meetings as mining meetings to turn anxiety and frustration into actionable and meaningful responses to data.
Making Data Review More Personal
Dana Murphy describes an approach to “data-review days” that looks beyond numbers to the faces of kids and talks about all kids in all of their humanity.
Student-Created Assessments
Ruth Metcalfe releases responsibility to her first-grade class to create formative assessments and take ownership in their learning.
Grow and Innovate with Reflection
Julie Cox makes a case for reflection as an essential tool for growth and innovations. She shares simple and powerful practices that will allow all educators to continue to deepen their instructional practices.
Formative Assessment From Share Sessions
Ruth Ayres outlines different kinds of share sessions and different formats for the share, including some that take advantage of technology.
How to Use Students’ Reading Logs as a Formative Literacy Assessment
Matt Renwick reminds us that there is a lot of information available in our classrooms that can inform instruction. Some of it is “hiding in plain sight,” for example reading logs.
Reading Quiz
Gretchen Schroeder shares the way she adjusts her reading quizzes to assess students’ analysis and deep thinking about texts.
Rethinking Late-Work Policies
Gretchen Schroeder asks herself tough questions about her late-work policy for high school students. In the end, she changed her late-work policy and found that it took no effort on her part, other than a shift in mindset, while yielding powerful results.
From Seed to Blossom
Leigh Anne Eck provides a guide to developing an End-of-Year Reflection for students to consider their own growth, as well as offer advice regarding curriculum and instruction.
Assessing Students Online: Small and Powerful Moves
Tammy Mulligan shares small and mighty moves when assessing students online.
Learning Standards: No Best Way
Jen Schwanke provides some critical questions for teachers to ask when they are interpreting a standard and bringing it to life with students.
Data That We Can Trust
Matt Renwick finds the data closest to the students we serve is more helpful to teachers than many benchmarks or screener scores.
Navigating the Interpretation Process
Tammy Mulligan shares how she introduces students to the process of interpreting literature at different grade and developmental levels.
Observing Skilled Readers
Mark Levine wonders why his most some of his most skilled readers take the most time to get through texts. So he asks them, and gets some fascinating answers he uses to assist struggling students.
The Power of Teaching Journals
Bitsy Parks finds inspiration for her teaching journal in the work of Debbie Miller. She explains how she uses her journal daily, and how it has evolved over time.
Remembering the Big Picture in Reading Assessments
Kate Mills notes her own miscues in reading a bedtime story to her young children, and thinks about what that means for analyzing the running records of readers in primary classrooms.
Making Learning Stick: Learning Progressions and Student-Created Exemplars
Tammy Mulligan explains the process of having students analyze and create models of good writing and analysis for assessing themselves and peers.
Can a High-Stakes Assessment Create Readers?
Stephanie Affinito encounters an unexpected by-product of testing for her son—the uninterrupted reading time waiting for others to finish builds a good habit. She shares how teachers might reclaim 10 minutes a day for independent reading.
Teaching Constructed Response Before Exams
Teaching the genre of tests can seem far removed from writing workshop. Matt Renwick explores how to teach constructed response in a way that is integrated with the tenets of good workshop instruction.
Status of the Class: Reflecting on Reading Communities
Franki Sibberson uses status of the class each day as a window into her fledgling reading community.
A Better Status of the Class
Dana Murphy finds that adding numbers of pages to her status-of-the-class list for reading makes all the difference in assessing students’ growth and needs as readers.
Releasing the Teaching to Students
Mark Levine releases responsibility for teaching and assessment to students late in the school year, and hears echoes of learning from previous units.
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