Introduction

Assessment has always been a prominent component of education. However, its role is changing. Traditionally, the purpose of assessment was to assign grades at the ends of courses or units, measure supposed aptitude for higher education, and compare students to each other (Marzano, Dodson, Simms, & Wipf, 2022). As the field of education shifts its goals toward ensuring all students learn, the purpose of assessment becomes more integrated with instruction. Assessment provides information about what students know and can do, what they still need to learn, and how the teacher should adjust instruction to help students meet the goals of the lesson, unit, or course.

In alignment with this more expansive view of assessment, education expert Robert J. Marzano (2010) provided a practitioner-friendly definition for classroom assessment: “anything a teacher does to gather information about a student’s knowledge or skill regarding a specific topic” (p. 22). Professors of education Christopher R. Gareis and Leslie W. Grant (2015) agreed, saying,

The way teachers see student learning is through a process known as assessment; and assessment, like teaching, is integrally related to our definition of learning. We define assessment as the process of using methods or tools to collect information about student learning. (p. 2)

In order to enact this conception of assessment, teachers must provide assessment opportunities and then engage in careful analysis of the results for the sake of planning or adjusting instruction. And it is clear that this approach is becoming more common. According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, “Teachers increasingly find themselves not just working in isolation to divine the instructional implications of assessment results, but also working collaboratively with colleagues to use results to improve the performance of individuals, classes, grades or the entire school” (Greenberg & Walsh, 2012, p. 2).

If educators are to use assessment data to improve results, those data must be based on high-quality assessments and assessment practices. This is the primary goal of this book: to support classroom teachers with relevant and necessary information about classroom assessment that produces timely and accurate information about student learning that teachers can use for instructional purposes. However, the view of assessment as integrated with learning requires a holistic, systemic approach. The methods we recommend in this book function as a component of standards-based learning

An Overview of Standards-Based Learning

A focus on standards has been a requirement for educators since the mid to late 1990s. Schools and districts are committed to ensuring that students demonstrate mastery of the intended knowledge provided by state departments of education. While there are various plausible approaches to standards-based learning, we propose that there are certain critical components within this endeavor, including priority standards, proficiency scales, and instructional cycles that include high-quality assessments. When schools or districts address these components, educators engage in what we term standards-based learning

Priority Standards

In the standards-based classroom, a set of priority standards identi fie s the essential content, including both knowledge and skills, which constitutes the majority of the curriculum for a particular course or content area and grade level. Teachers simply do not have sufficient instructional time during the K–12 span to provide instruction on all state standards as written, and students do not have enough time to learn them (Hoegh, 2020; Marzano, 2003). If teachers do not narrow the curriculum to a set of essential priorities, they find themselves moving rapidly through an enormous amount of content, never having the time to ensure student proficiency on the required standards. Prioritizing the curriculum has the effect of providing enough instructional time to allow teachers to go deep on the essentials.

Prioritization of standards should be a schoolwide or districtwide process, guided by criteria like endurance, leverage, readiness, teacher judgment, and appearance on highstakes assessments (Ainsworth, 2003; Heflebower, Hoegh, & Warrick, 2014). Because priority standards identify the essentials of the curriculum for a content area, grade level, or course, and because instructional time is limited, the number of priority standards should be relatively small. In our experience, it is common for a teacher or team of teachers to identify ten to fifteen priority standards for a single content area and grade level or course. This number is a suggestion and not a universally applied rule; for some grade levels and content areas, the total number of priority standards may be fewer, and sometimes the number is greater. The key idea to remember is that by keeping the number of priority standards low, the likelihood is greater that teachers will have the instructional time they need to ensure that students are proficient on these very important standards.

Note that no standards go untaught. Standards not deemed priority are categorized as supporting or supplemental, not discarded. All standards are addressed in instruction, but the majority of the instructional time and assessment focus will be on priority standards. The priority standards will constitute the bulk of instruction and they will, in general terms, form the basis of assessment, feedback, grading, and reporting.

For additional information on the process of identifying priority and supporting standards, we refer readers to A School Leader’s Guide to Standards-Based Grading (Heflebower et al., 2014) and Leading Standards-Based Learning (Heflebower, Hoegh, & Warrick, 2021).