ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
- How can schools prepare learners for a complex and continually changing world?
- How do we know that students are learning what we think we are teaching?
- How can we measure the full spectrum of the knowledge and skills that today’s learners need?
- How can we design assessment that is symbiotic, strategic, purposeful, and technically sound?
MISSION
- Promote the full potential of balanced assessment
- Provide tools and ideas to make assessment meaningful
- Endorse research-based practices for choosing and using assessment purposefully
- Connect theory with practice: From minute by minute to comprehensive measures
- Develop well-rounded professional understandings and competencies in assessment
UNIFYING PRINCIPLES
- Assessment is a continuous cycle that supports improvement in teaching and learning
- Assessments have multiple purposes (summative, formative, and diagnostic) and include different types of measures (standardized, classroom, and alternative)
- Each assessment provides a measure of evidence on which to base informed decisions and reasoned judgments
“The educational process is one of continual reorganization, reconstruction, transforming… since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate, save more education.”
~ John Dewey