High-stakes testing. Mandated content standards and benchmarks. Public scrutiny of student and school performance. Accountability. Teachers today are challenged to provide instruction that will measure up: to the expectations of administrators, parents, and taxpayers; to their own professional standards; and, most essentially, to the needs of students. Policy debates rage in the press, and pedagogical pundits always have a new and better solution to offer, but inside the walls of the classroom, instruction boils down to teachers deciding what they want their students to learn, planning how to promote that learning, implementing those plans, and then determining if the plans worked. And the best instructional decisions are informed by empirical research, assessment evidence, and the sound judgment of the professional educator. In this book, W. James Popham calls on his half-century in the classroom to provide a practical, four-stage framework for guiding teachers through their most important instructional decisions: curriculum determination, instructional design, instructional monitoring, and instructional evaluation. Along the way, he emphasizes the critical ways in which assessment can and should influence instruction, advocates for a dash of curricular insurrection, and offers advice for maintaining both teaching excellence and teachers' sanity.

How do you judge the quality of a school, a district, a teacher, a student? By the test scores, of course. Yet for all the talk, what educational tests can and can’t tell you, and how scores can be misunderstood and misused, remains a mystery to most. The complexities of testing are routinely ignored, either because they are unrecognized, or because they may be—well, complicated. Inspired by a popular Harvard course for students without an extensive mathematics background, Measuring Up demystifies educational testing—from MCAS to SAT to WAIS, with all the alphabet soup in between. Bringing statistical terms down to earth, Daniel Koretz takes readers through the most fundamental issues that arise in educational testing and shows how they apply to some of the most controversial issues in education today, from high-stakes testing to special education. He walks readers through everyday examples to show what tests do well, what their limits are, how easily tests and scores can be oversold or misunderstood, and how they can be used sensibly to help discover how much kids have learned.

The following discussion and analysis of the elements of the supervisory process, and statement of the technique and professional standards for the supervision of instruction, will be read with interest by those who are concerned with the work of school supervision. The fundamental purpose of all school supervision is to increase the efficiency of the classroom teacher. For a supervisor to be constructively critical and helpful requires a good understanding of both the purposes and the technique of supervision; and the fundamental principles and methods underlying such helpful and constructive service the author of the present volume has here set forth.

What is understanding and how does it differ from knowledge? How can we determine the big ideas worth understanding? Why is understanding an important teaching goal, and how do we know when students have attained it? How can we create a rigorous and engaging curriculum that focuses on understanding and leads to improved student performance in today's high-stakes, standards-based environment? Authors Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe answer these and many other questions in this second edition of Understanding by Design. Drawing on feedback from thousands of educators around the world who have used the UbD framework since its introduction in 1998, the authors have greatly revised and expanded their original work to guide educators across the K-16 spectrum in the design of curriculum, assessment, and instruction. With an improved UbD Template at its core, the book explains the rationale of backward design and explores in greater depth the meaning of such key ideas as essential questions and transfer tasks. Readers will learn why the familiar coverage- and activity-based approaches to curriculum design fall short, and how a focus on the six facets of understanding can enrich student learning. With an expanded array of practical strategies, tools, and examples from all subject areas, the book demonstrates how the research-based principles of Understanding by Design apply to district frameworks as well as to individual units of curriculum. Combining provocative ideas, thoughtful analysis, and tested approaches, this new edition of Understanding by Design offers teacher-designers a clear path to the creation of curriculum that ensures better learning and a more stimulating experience for students and teachers alike.

This volume emerges from a partnership between the American Federation of Teachers and the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The partnership brought together researchers and expert teachers for intensive dialogue sessions focusing on what each community knows about effective mathematical learning and instruction. The chapters deal with the research on, and conceptual analysis of, specific arithmetic topics (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, decimals, and fractions) or with overarching themes that pervade the early curriculum and constitute the links with the more advanced topics of mathematics (intuition, number sense, and estimation). Serving as a link between the communities of cognitive researchers and mathematics educators, the book capitalizes on the recent research successes of cognitive science and reviews the literature of the math education community as well.

Some vols. also contain reports of cases in the General Court of Virginia.