EDUC 772 - Assessment and Evaluation

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This course is designed to help middle school teachers acquire deeper understandings of evaluation and assessment. Students will come to realize that effective educational programs are linked to dynamic assessment schemes that help individual students grow and succeed. The primary goal of the course is to help teachers realize that improving assessment in the classroom leads to higher quality student work on all levels and that making these improvements is not a merely a matter of introducing new procedures, frameworks, techniques, rubrics or guidelines. Expanding ideas on assessment is intricately rooted in how a teacher sees one’s self and is seen by the students. A teacher, along with the students, becomes not only a judge of quality, but also a designer of the plans necessary to meet the standards. For achievement to be raised, teachers must help the students learn how to make better judgments about the quality of their own work. The course is focused on helping teachers develop models for assessment that align with the needs of their students, as well as local, state and national standards. The course is taught using a variety of active learning approaches, including inquiries, discussions, debates, collaborative review of student work, descriptive studies, action research projects and clinical trials.
Prerequisite: Prerequisite: Consent of department.