COVID-19 has caused unprecedented disruption to student learning, and so getting useful, actionable information on where students are in their learning has never been more important. Unfortunately, standardized tests can’t provide that—it’s not what they were designed to do. Moreover, as recent research on human memory shows, student performance in their first days back after extended absence is not a good indication of what students know, understand, and can do.

What teachers need are ways of reconnecting students with material they may have forgotten during extended periods of remote teaching, together with instructionally relevant information on their students’ current abilities. In other words, what teachers need are strategies for “just-in-time” classroom formative assessment.

This webinar will provide teachers and administrators with the latest research evidence on why classroom formative assessment is the single most cost-effective way of accelerating student progress, providing concrete examples for use in both remote and face-to-face contexts.

Watch this ON-DEMAND, interactive session with one of the world’s most foremost education authorities, Dylan Wiliam, PhD. During the webinar, you’ll discover strategies teachers can immediately use in their classrooms to accelerate student learning.

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“Most district assessment systems are neither comprehensive nor balanced,” say four of the world’s top assessment experts: Susan Brookhart, Jay McTighe, Rick Stiggins, and Dylan Wiliam.

By that, they mean that assessment systems in most American schools are doing students a disservice—even hindering their progress—by failing to provide meaningful, relevant, sufficient information to learners and their teachers. They’re preventing educators from eliciting, gathering, and interpreting the real-time evidence they need to make minute-to-minute instructional decisions that, research shows, are key to improving learning.

But school districts have the power to move forward with a bold vision for the future of assessment—a vision of systems that assess a wide array of valued learning outcomes, not just those that are easy to test. That improve student learning and document the learning for a variety of stakeholders. That measure learning not just for students, but also for classrooms, schools, and districts. It goes far beyond standardized testing, giving everyone the information they need to make a lasting and significant difference for students:

• Classroom formative assessment takes place within and between lessons
• Medium-cycle formative assessment occurs within and between instructional units
• Classroom summative assessment addresses grading policies and practices
• Long-cycle formative assessment happens several times during the school year
• District and state-level accountability assessment provide an overview

Brookhart, McTighe, Stiggins, and Wiliam aim to disrupt the way assessment is currently being handled in almost every school in the United States. They know it won’t happen overnight, but for forward-thinking assessment leaders striving to do what’s best for learners, reading this policy paper is an excellent first step.

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Download the Paper

On March 26, Susan Brookhart, Jay McTighe, Rick Stiggins, and Dylan Wiliam—four of the world’s top authorities on formative assessment—released a paper about urgent equity problems they’ve discovered in American assessment systems.