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=Harlem High School Pre-Assessment Project=

“Assessment is today’s means of modifying tomorrow’s instruction.” Carol Ann Tomlinson

**Common Formative Assessments: An Overview** by Larry Ainsworth
 * What Are Common Formative Assessments?**
 * Periodic or interim assessments collaboratively designed by grade-level or course teams of teachers
 * Designed as matching pre- and post-assessments to ensure same-assessment to same-assessment comparison of student growth
 * Similar in design and format to district and state assessments
 * Items should represent essential (Power) standards //only//
 * A blend of item types, including selected-response (multiple choice, true/false, matching) and constructed response (short answer or extended response
 * Administered to all students in grade level or course several times during the quarter, semester, trimester, or entire school year
 * Student results analyzed to guide instructional planning and delivery

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 * // What Are the Guidelines for Designing Common Formative Assessments? //**
 * 1) Identify and vertically align power standards (key concepts) for each course
 * 2) Determine important topics to assess
 * 3) Pinpoint concepts and skills students need to know and be able to do
 * 4) Determine Big Ideas that represent the integrated understanding students need to gain
 * 5) Consider Learning Progressions as you develop questions.
 * 6) Collaboratively design pre- and post-assessments--aligned to one another--that assess student understanding of the concepts, skills and Big Ideas for the unit of study.
 * 7) Include both selected-response and constructed-response items.
 * 8) Assess at all levels of thinking (Bloom's Taxonomy)

A number of definitions of learning progressions exist in the literature and include the following:
 * What are Learning Progressions?**
 * Masters & Forster (1997) describe learning progression as progress maps which are vertical maps that provide “a description of skills understanding and knowledge in the sequence in which they typically develop: a picture of what it means to ‘improve’ in an area of learning” (p.1)
 * Referring to the domain of science, Wilson and Bertenthal (2005) define learning progressions as “descriptions of successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about an idea that follow one another as students learn: they lay out in words and examples what it means to move toward more expert understanding” (p.3).
 * The authors of Taking Science to School (NRC, 2007) define learning progressions as “descriptions of the successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about a topic that can follow one another as children learn about and investigate a topic over a broad span of time” (p. 8-2).
 * Stevens et al., (2007) describe learning progressions as descriptions of how students gain more expertise within a discipline over a period of time. "They represent not only how knowledge and understanding develops, but also predict how knowledge builds over time" (p.2).
 * **// Popham, (2007) defines learning progressions as a “carefully sequenced set of building blocks that students must master en route to a more distant curricular aim. The building blocks consist of sub skills and bodies of enabling knowledge.” (p. 83) //**
 * For Smith et al., (2006) learning progressions are “based on research syntheses and conceptual analyses and describe successively more sophisticated ways of reasoning in a content domain that follow one another as students learn” (p.2).