Expanding the impact of classroom assessment practices on student learning
Schools, districts, states, and their assessment partners—driven by an urgency to provide valuable, actionable information to educators and students that statewide summative assessments cannot alone provide—are increasingly focused on classroom assessment practices embedded in instructional activities.
By Stephen Murphy, Ph.D. and Steve Ferrara, Ph.D.
As our education system becomes more student-centered, the future of assessment will shift from event-and pressure-based testing with periodic measures of progress to more authentic assessments that demonstrate what students can do and use assessment itself as part of the learning process. Assessment will increasingly include measures of the impact of student engagement, take advantage of new technologies that will expand assessment capabilities to introduce immersive environments for students to explore, portfolio and project-based learning approaches, and provide automated or teacher-generated, immediate, personalized, formative feedback on student strengths and learning needs. This paper embraces these changes and calls on schools, districts, and states to think about student learning as a whole and how multiple measures are brought together to inform student progress against learning goals.