Understanding Instructionally Useful Assessment

Book excerpt: Understanding Instructionally Useful Assessment offers new insights into how various types of assessments, from the state to the classroom, will differ in their usefulness for supporting instructional decision-making and student learning. In order to most effectively serve students, it is essential that educators avoid conflating the assessment information that teachers use for instructional purposes and the data that leaders and administrators use for evaluative or monitoring purposes. This book provides classroom teachers as well as school and district leaders with a clear conception of what makes assessments—their purpose, design, reporting, and resulting information—useful or not for informing instruction and how they can select assessment tools suited to specific purposes. Each chapter addresses the knowledge and skills that K-12 staff need in order to challenge claims made by policymakers, test vendors, or even other educators that any assessment can be used to inform instruction. Educators will come away better prepared to remove unnecessary or redundant assessments from their systems and to create structures, policies, and processes that best support the instructional usefulness of assessments for student learning.