Regular marked price: $39.95Discount Price: $26.37
Cost Savings: $13.58 (34%)Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 371.261
EAN num: 9780309072724
ISBN number: 0309072727
Label: National Academies Press
Manufacturer: National Academies Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 382
Printing Date: September 27, 2001
Publishing house: National Academies Press
Sale Popularity Level: 191126
Studio: National Academies Press
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Education is a hot topic. From the stage of presidential debates to tonight's dinner table, it is an issue that most Americans are deeply concerned about. While there are many strategies for improving the educational process, we need a way to find out what works and what doesn't work as well. Educational assessment seeks to determine just how well students are learning and is an integral part of our quest for improved education.
The nation is pinning greater expectations on educational assessment than ever before. We look to these assessment tools when documenting whether students and institutions are truly meeting education goals. But we must stop and ask a crucial question: What kind of assessment is most effective?
At a time when traditional testing is subject to increasing criticism, research suggests that new, exciting approaches to assessment may be on the horizon. Advances in the sciences of how people learn and how to measure such learning offer the hope of developing new kinds of assessments-assessments that help students succeed in school by making as clear as possible the nature of their accomplishments and the progress of their learning.
Knowing What Students Know essentially explains how expanding knowledge in the scientific fields of human learning and educational measurement can form the foundations of an improved approach to assessment. These advances suggest ways that the targets of assessment-what students know and how well they know it-as well as the methods used to make inferences about student learning can be made more valid and instructionally useful. Principles for designing and using these new kinds of assessments are presented, and examples are used to illustrate the principles. Implications for policy, practice, and research are also explored.
With the promise of a productive research-based approach to assessment of student learning, Knowing What Students Know will be important to education administrators, assessment designers, teachers and teacher educators, and education advocates.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
This book is not terrible and provides a good overview and introduction to assessment. The previous reviewer of this book could not have been more wrong about grades. Actually, research shows grades are a horrible predictor of sucess when controlling for other factors (income, socio-economic status, etc.). Research also shows there is *no* link between a grade and what someone has learned. This is because grades are relative and measure an individual's performance at one time, although I will admit that using multiple methods and more numerous testing will increase the validity of grades. If tied to the learning goals of a course, grades can be effective. But as a policy making tool or measure of what someone has learned, grades really don't say much, if anything at all.
Rated by buyers 
-
The thesis of this book is that (1) tests of educational assessment are increasingly being looked at by politicians (2) this has implications for the employment of educators and (3) being very clever, we teachers should be able to come up with new wasy of measuring student performance that won't actually test what the students have learned.
Okay, perhaps that's a bit overly cynical. But not by much.
Politicians are indeed looking closely at student performance, and for the very first time in a long time, thinking about grading how well the public school are performing. And to be fair to the teachers, the intent often has as much to do with individual political aims as it does with education. So teachers repsond in kind, ganing the system, teaching to the exams and so forth. The only parties being left out of this game are the students themselves.
Assessment is needed, both to judge how well students are doing, and to judge how well the schools themselves are doing. The finny thing is that there is a measure that's been ignored in all of this. It's called grading.
Countless studies have been done over the past 50 years to determine what the best indicator of college performance is. People have looked at SAT scores, socioeconomic status, personality and dozens of other measure, and the one measure that consistently explains most of the varience is undergraduate grades. That's it. Even given the grade inflation of the past few decades, grades are still a pretty reasonable indicator.
Find other books like this one:
