Provides guidelines for fairly and validly assessing students in small, cooperative groups. Discusses the purposes of assessment; how processes occurring during group collaboration may work for or against the purpose of assessment; how to design assessments with clear, consistent goals; issues involved in assigning students to groups; and…

Uses oral-language skills assessment to illustrate sound classroom assessment practices, stressing interrelationships among teaching, learning, and assessment and viewing assessment as a continual, ongoing reference in a dynamic process, not an end in itself. Describes supportive classroom environments, explains oral language profiles, and…

Describes efforts to help teachers learn to use new math and reading assessments in their classrooms, highlighting characteristics of professional development that successfully foster change in teachers' ideas and practice. After describing a multi-year staff development/research project on assessment, the paper discusses factors that support and…

Discusses values ascribed to performance assessment and recent criticisms of assessment and suggests model-based performance assessment for remedying and avoiding these criticisms. The paper explains the merits of a systematic approach to developing performance assessments and rubrics based on general models across ages and subject areas for…

Examines the use of portfolios for assessing preservice teachers. The article describes portfolios as an alternative assessment approach, examines the preservice teacher's domains of knowledge and performance that can be assessed by portfolios, and explicates the general features used to operate a portfolio system. (SM)

Discusses the teacher assessment system of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). The article explains the NBPTS policy on assessment and describes the NBPTS assessment model, which includes school site and assessment center modules. The assessment system leads to rigorous standards, national board certification, and…

Recommends improving preservice teacher assessment by providing multiple forms of on-campus laboratory experiences (e.g., microteaching, reflective teaching, simulations) that offer job-related tasks. Performance on the tasks could be assessed at multiple points and for various purposes (selecting preservice teachers and student teachers and…

Discusses fairness in student evaluation, focusing on art criticism as a metaphor in which the evaluator transforms into something akin to an art critic. The article explains what the art criticism approach looks like in the classroom and describes the process of art criticism (description, analysis, interpretation, judgment). )SM)