Posted: April 24th, 2025

Week 2 discussion

 Semi-rural Fairfield High School is fairly small, and Fairfield students are a close-knit group. It is not unusual for freshmen and seniors to “hang out” together. Extra-curricular activities include various sports, drama, band, chorus, cheerleading, dance squad, and numerous clubs. About three-quarters of the students participate in at least one extra-curricular activity. Many participate in several. 

Joshua is a junior and an excellent student, regularly achieving at the honor-roll or high-honor-roll level. He participates in drama, chorus, band, and chess club and is a member of the National Honor Society. He is a nice young man who is also quite sensitive. He has never been particularly social. He hasn’t dated and rarely goes out with students from school except in connection with the activities mentioned above.

  

1. What are the issues in this case? 
2. Why might a student become a target of harassment by peers? 
3. What, if anything, could Joshua have done to prevent or stop the harassment? 
4. What could Joshua’s teachers have done to stop the harassment? 
5. What should be done at this point? By whom? Why? 
6. What do you think will happen now? Why? 

Submission Instructions:

• Your initial post should be at least 200 words, formatted, and cited in current APA style with support from at least 2 academic sources.  Your initial post is worth 3 points.

Module 2: Lecture Materials & Resources

 

Moral Development, Social Cultural Diversity, & Exceptional Learners

 

Read and watch the lecture resources & materials below early in the week to help you respond to the discussion questions and to complete your assignment(s).

(Note: The citations below are provided for your research convenience. Students should always cross-reference the current APA guide for correct styling of citations and references in their academic work.)

Read

· Durwin, C. C., & Reese-Weber, M. J. (2020).

· Chapter 4: Moral Development

· Chapter 17: Classroom Management

·

Creating an APA annotated bibliography

Download Creating an APA annotated bibliography

Memorial University Libraries. (2008). 
How to write annotated bibliographies. Retrieved November 13, 2013, from http://www.library.mun.ca/guides/howto/annotated_bibl.php

Watch

·
Howard Gardner of The Multiple Intelligence Theory (7:54)
Derrick Purefoy. (2009, November 7). 
Howard Gardner of The Multiple Intelligence Theory [Video]. YouTube.

Howard Gardner of The Multiple Intelligence TheoryLinks to an external site.

·
Project based learning (8:27)
LearningGate. (2011, February 2). 
Project based learning [Video]. YouTube.

Project Based LearningLinks to an external site.

·
Wechsler adult intelligence (13:23)
Audiopedia. (2014, August 11). 
Wechsler adult intelligence [Video]. YouTube.

Wechsler Adult Intelligence ScaleLinks to an external site.

Supplemental Materials & Resources

· Shepard, L. A., Penuel, W. R., & Davidson, K. L. (2017). Design principles for new systems of assessment. 
Phi Delta Kappan, 
98(6), 47-52.

·

 Design principles for new systems of assessment

Download  Design principles for new systems of assessment

 

Module 2 Discussion

 

 

Case Study Discussion

Read the following case study, then answer and discuss the questions below.

Semi-rural Fairfield High School is fairly small, and Fairfield students are a close-knit group. It is not unusual for freshmen and seniors to “hang out” together. Extra-curricular activities include various sports, drama, band, chorus, cheerleading, dance squad, and numerous clubs. About three-quarters of the students participate in at least one extra-curricular activity. Many participate in several. 

Joshua is a junior and an excellent student, regularly achieving at the honor-roll or high-honor-roll level. He participates in drama, chorus, band, and chess club and is a member of the National Honor Society. He is a nice young man who is also quite sensitive. He has never been particularly social. He hasn’t dated and rarely goes out with students from school except in connection with the activities mentioned above. 

A rumor that Joshua is gay has been circulating this year. At first he tries to ignore the rumor, thinking that if he does, people will eventually find something or somebody else to gossip about. However, it persists and soon escalates into harassment. He finds nasty notes on and in his locker. When his back is turned, he hears people taunting him with rude comments regarding his supposed sexual orientation. When he makes his curtain call following the fall play, there are boos and jeers from some members of the audience. He begins to feel that most of the school is against him. He KNOWS that the animosity aimed at him is the result of “small minds”, but that doesn’t make his school experience any better.  

His family complains to the principal who attempts to intervene on Joshua’s behalf. Several students who have participated in the harassment are punished. Instead of curtailing the harassment, however, this results in further escalation. Joshua’s car tires are slashed. Somebody paints a rainbow on his rear window one night when his car is parked in front of his house. Somebody else paints derogatory names on his car. He begins to receive pornographic literature in the mail. While nobody ever lays a hand on him, Joshua is fearful for his safety, as are his parents, the teachers, and the principal. 

Joshua withdraws further and further from his peers. He stops attending school club meetings because he is unsure who his harassers are. He feels as if all eyes are on him at all times. He no longer participates in class discussions. He goes to school, does the minimum, and goes home. His grades decline. He feels powerless and worthless.  

1. What are the issues in this case? 

2. Why might a student become a target of harassment by peers? 

3. What, if anything, could Joshua have done to prevent or stop the harassment? 

4. What could Joshua’s teachers have done to stop the harassment? 

5. What should be done at this point? By whom? Why? 

6. What do you think will happen now? Why? 

 

Submission Instructions:

· Your initial post should be at least 200 words, formatted, and cited in current APA style with support from at least 2 academic sources.  Your initial post is worth 3 points.

image3

image4

image1

image2

V98 N6 kappanmagazine.org 47
Thinkstock

loRRie a. ShepaRd (lorrie.shepard@colorado.edu) is distinguished professor of education, WilliaM R. penuel (@bpenuel) is
professor of learning sciences and human development, and kRiSTen l. daVidSon is a postdoctoral research associate, all at the
University of Colorado Boulder, School of Education.

by lorrie a. Shepard, William R. penuel,
and kristen l. davidson

When Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)
in December 2015, it carried forward many of the same testing re-
quirements that existed under No Child Left Behind (NCLB). But at
the same time, it softened the consequences, taking away the federal
government’s power to determine what will happen to schools that
fail to meet specifi c testing goals. From now on, states and districts
can decide for themselves what achievement targets to set, and they
can choose to focus on needed supports instead of sanctions for their
lowest-performing schools.

Free from strict Adequate Yearly Progress accounting, many state
and district education leaders are exploring new ways to collect in-
formation about student learning as well as new ways to use that
information. Where NCLB mandated testing strictly for summa-
tive purposes (i.e., to judge how well students, teachers, and schools
have performed), ESSA permits and even provides some funding to
encourage states to develop balanced assessment systems. Such sys-
tems encompass not just summative tests but also local, formative
assessments, which could include curriculum-embedded assessments
designed to provide teachers with insights about instructional sup-
ports that are needed.

Rather than being led by national
testing mandates, state and local
leaders should design balanced
assessment systems guided by
coherence, research on learning,
and attention to equity.

R&D

R&D appears in each issue of Kappan with the assistance

of the Deans Alliance, which is composed of the deans of

the education schools/colleges at the following universities:

George Washington University, Harvard University, Michigan

State University, Northwestern University, Stanford University,

Teachers College Columbia University, University of California,

Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, University of

Colorado, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania,

and University of Wisconsin.

Design
principles
for new
systems of
assessment

48 Kappan March 2017

texts. And let’s say that school system leaders intro-
duce assessments that are designed to help teachers
gauge the kinds of support their students need in
order to reach this standard. We would judge this
system to be horizontally coherent if students are also
given classroom assignments that call upon them
to make well-reasoned arguments and if teachers
use practices (such as asking complex questions as
prompts for classroom discussions) that have been
found to help students strengthen their own logic
and use of evidence.

If, in turn, classroom assignments, course grades,
and external accountability tests routinely ask stu-
dents to demonstrate such reasoning, then the as-
sessment system would be vertically coherent as
well. In short, all parts of the educational system,
including curriculum, instruction, and assess-
ments of all kinds, ought to be working toward the
same goals, helping move students toward shared
definitions of what they ought to know and be
able to do.

Unfortunately, the testing mandates of the past
two decades have only made things less coherent (or
coherent but not meaningful, insofar as they have
fostered a teaching-to-the-test approach, aiming
toward narrow curricular goals). Even in the face of
those mandates, many teachers have experimented
with various kinds of formative assessment, from exit
slips to self-assessments, multidraft writing projects,
and others. But in most cases, they have done so with-
out much support from their districts or guidance
about which approaches are most strongly grounded
in research. And while these teachers’ uses of forma-
tive assessment may have delivered a strong mes-
sage about the kinds of learning they value, their
students have likely received very different messages
from the high-stakes standardized achievement tests
they have had to take.

Given new flexibility under ESSA, districts and
schools now have an opportunity to design and
implement coherent systems, with formative as-
sessment having a more prominent role. To do so
effectively, however, educators will need some back-
ground knowledge about the research that supports
the main approaches to formative assessment. Thus,
in the next section, we offer a condensed summary
of four key assessment models (Penuel & Shepard,
2016), with a focus on their underlying theories of
learning.

grounding assessments in a model of learning

In order to be coherent, an assessment system should
be based on a shared model of learning. It won’t be
effective, though, unless that underlying model of
learning has a valid basis. And it won’t be equitable
unless it includes curricular supports for students and

The question is: What guiding principles would
help ensure the quality of these new, balanced as-
sessment systems? Drawing on lessons learned over
three decades of research and reform, we argue that
state and local leaders should take the lead in design-
ing new assessments guided by two core principles:
First, make assessments coherent, integrating them
with rich curriculum and effective instruction; sec-
ond, ground this integration of curriculum, instruc-
tion, and embedded assessments in equity-focused
research on learning.

building coherent assessment systems

The idea of building a coherent system of assess-
ments “from classroom to state” was first advanced
in a National Research Council committee report,
Knowing What Students Know (Pellegrino, Chu-
dowsky, & Glaser, 2001, p. 9), which synthesized
findings from contemporary research on both
learning and educational measurement. Whether
an assessment is meant to be used in a classroom
or for state accountability, it should assess what is
truly valuable for students to learn, such as core
ideas and key skills from the various content areas
(p. 248). By contrast, many classroom worksheets
and multiple-choice tests that mimic state exams
have reflected a negative kind of coherence, re-
quiring students to answer superficial questions
or recall simple facts.

Further, the report explained that assessments
should be coherent not only vertically (i.e., the same
standards and learning goals drive assessments at
both the classroom and state accountability levels)
but also horizontally. Horizontal coherence, at each
level of the system, refers to the conceptual integra-
tion of assessments with a shared model of learn-
ing. At the state level, this means that accountabil-
ity assessments must fully embody learning goals
envisioned by standards. At the district level, as-
sessments must be coherent with standards, cur-
ricula, and professional development. And at the
classroom level, horizontal coherence requires that
assessments be so thoroughly integrated with cur-
riculum and instruction that the insights they pro-
vide can immediately be put to use. Thus, class-
room formative assessments must be built on much
more fine-grained models of learning than state-
level tests. In order to provide the kinds of specific
feedback and instructional supports that students
need at intermediate stages of development, teach-
ers need research-based tools that are attuned to the
very specific ways in which student understanding
develops in each academic domain.

For example, let’s say that a state or district stan-
dard specifies that students must learn how to make
and defend reasoned arguments about informational

V98 N6 kappanonline.org 49

Join the conversation

facebook.com/pdkintl
@pdkintl

#1. Data-driven decision making

Data-driven decision making is most accurately
portrayed as a policy theory of action. It relies on no
specifi c model of learning but, rather, draws its in-
spiration from theories of organizational change
(Deming, 1986; Senge, 1990). The idea is that edu-
cators should set specifi c learning goals, use interim
or benchmark assessments (sometimes marketed as
“formative assessments”) to check student progress
toward reaching them, fi nd new teaching strategies
to address areas of weakness, and continue to moni-
tor student progress over time.

Data-driven decision making assumes that teach-
ers will know how to help students — or will seek
training that shows them what to do — if the interim
tests reveal that students are struggling. But this as-
sumption has never been supported by empirical re-
search fi ndings. And researchers have found this ap-
proach to be especially ineffective in low-performing
schools that tend to lack the capacity to adapt in this
way (Elmore, 2003).

To date, most of the research on data-driven deci-
sion making has focused on the work of data teams
(groups of educators tasked with analyzing test re-
sults). Findings show that, at best, such teams are able
to identify which students are the most in need of help
and which objectives are most in need of reteaching
(Shepard, Davidson, & Bowman, 2011). However,
because interim assessments offer little to no insight
into the reasons why students are underperforming
or how to help them, their use hasn’t been found to
lead to improvements in teaching or learning.

Further, data-driven decision making sometimes
goes hand-in-hand with the use of extrinsic rewards
and punishments to pressure students to improve.
For example, teachers or administrators might post
the results of interim tests in the hallway, letting ev-
erybody know who’s on track and who still needs to
get, say, three more items right to reach profi ciency.
Yet, research has largely discredited this approach to
motivating young people to learn. When students
are struggling, being told how far behind they are
doesn’t help them move ahead. Moreover, the re-
sponse to identifying students in need of more sup-
port has often been to create “pull-out” programs for
such students, rather than promoting more equitable
teaching in the regular classroom. Instead, students
need meaningful opportunities to engage with the
material, ask questions, try ideas, and receive useful
guidance and feedback from teachers and peers.

#2. Strategy-focused formative assessment

Strategy-focused practices include various tools
and techniques for engaging students in analyzing
and improving their own work, such as ways to pose
questions that invite classroom discussion about on-

adequate preparation of teachers to help students
meet learning goals. Its goals must be compelling,
but those goals must also be reachable, and they must
feature teaching practices that are consistent with
what is known about student motivation, identity
formation, and cognitive development.

In an early and widely infl uential review of the
research on formative assessment, Black and Wil-
iam (1998) identifi ed a number of distinct lines of
scholarship in this area. But while they noted that
differing approaches to formative assessment relied
on very different learning models, they did not of-
fer a way to integrate those perspectives. Nor did
they show how disparate ideas about motivation,
self-assessment, mastery, the giving of feedback to
students, and other issues could be integrated into
a coherent whole.

Since that time, many researchers have described
formative assessment as though it were a single, co-
herent practice, without recognizing that the label
refers to varied learning goals and theories that are
not necessarily compatible with each other because
they draw upon very different conceptual models.
Here, we call out those differences, describing four
distinct approaches that have been promoted as “for-
mative assessment.” We argue that the latter two
perspectives hold the greatest promise for support-
ing more ambitious and equitable, next-generation
visions of teaching and learning, but we also point
out that each of these approaches has limitations.

All parts of the educational
system ought to be working
toward the same goals, helping
move students toward shared
defi nitions of what they ought to
know and be able to do.

50 Kappan March 2017

content area and help them refl ect on and understand
what it means to become truly profi cient in that area.

#3. Sociocognitive formative assessment

Sociocognitive approaches are meant to assess stu-
dents’ understandings and skills as they participate
in increasingly sophisticated practices common to
disciplinary experts. Further, because thinking and
learning are presumed to be fundamentally social
activities, assessment is grounded in “local instruc-
tional theories” of learning, whereby a sequence of
instructional activities is devised to support the par-
ticular group of students in developing profi ciency
(Gravemeijer, 2004).

Instructional sequences are typically based on either
a “learning progressions” (or “trajectories”) approach,
which aims to help students move toward specifi c dis-
ciplinary goals (Simon, 1995; Smith et al., 2006), or
a “knowledge-in-pieces” (or “facets”) view, in which
learning is seen as a less orderly process, and more
attention is paid to the specifi c problems students are
trying to solve that require use of disciplinary knowl-
edge (diSessa, 1988). In both cases, assessment materi-
als are designed for the particular content area, with
attention to the challenges that students typically face
when studying the given material, as well as common
approaches to helping them move forward.

In addition to gauging students’ progress in mas-
tering content knowledge, sociocognitive strategies
aim to help them take on the dispositions and iden-
tities of the given fi eld. Thus, this approach tends
to favor assessment practices (such as collaborative
inquiry, expertly facilitated questioning and discus-
sion, and qualitative feedback) that allow teachers to
pay attention to how students are (and are not yet)
acting, thinking, and reasoning in disciplinary ways.

One example that has been found to be effective is
the Inquiry Project, a three-year sequence of instruc-
tional units designed to progressively build upper-
elementary students’ understandings about the na-
ture of matter (Smith et al., 2006). Another example,
designed for the middle grades, is the Contingent
Pedagogies project (Penuel et al., 2017), which gives
teachers specifi c questions with which to elicit stu-
dents’ ideas about the physical world, as well as dis-
cussion prompts meant to get students talking about
ideas and methods that are central to the study of
Earth science.

Two key strengths of the sociocognitive approach
to assessment are its discipline-specifi c learning
goals and its well-articulated learning theory (Penuel
& Shepard, 2016). Rather than telling students how
many correct and incorrect answers they got on a
test, the point is to reveal how they think about and
try to solve specifi c problems that have been chosen
precisely because they relate to key concepts in the

going projects, guidelines for assigning students to
revise papers, and rubrics for self- and peer-assess-
ment.

Evidence suggests that when teachers have mean-
ingful opportunities to learn and try such techniques,
they can become more skilled at creating classroom
environments in which students assume an active
role in their own learning. One well-known example
of this approach, the King’s-Medway-Oxfordshire
Formative Assessment Project — in which students
were taught to assess and build upon their ideas,
identify their own sources of intrinsic motivation,
and monitor and regulate their own learning — was
found to have signifi cant and positive effects on stu-
dents’ engagement and academic progress (Black et
al., 2003).

It’s important to note, though, that strategy-fo-
cused approaches are not grounded in any particular
theory of learning. Rather, they amount to a loose
collection of all-purpose strategies by which teachers
and students can assess their ongoing work. While
those strategies could be used to help young people
acquire a deep understanding of sophisticated aca-
demic content, they can just as easily be used to pro-
mote rote mastery of a shallow curriculum. When
it comes to the goals of learning, the approach is
agnostic and, for that reason, quite limited.

A much more effective way to practice formative
assessment, we would argue, is to choose tools and
measures that are connected to the specifi c fi eld and
its goals and purposes. As the next two strategies
demonstrate, the most powerful assessment tasks en-
gage students in the genuine practices of the given

What guiding principles
would help ensure the
quality of these new, balanced
assessment systems?

V98 N6 kappanonline.org 51

Join the conversation

facebook.com/pdkintl
@pdkintl

given subject area. In turn, this gives teachers use-
ful insights into what students already know, spe-
cifi c ideas that confuse them, concepts they’ll need
to learn right away, and other things to consider as
they decide how best to teach the material.

However, developing these kinds of fi ne-grained,
subject-specifi c assessment tools requires a lot of ex-
pertise and resources. As a result, they are not yet
available to many schools and districts, or for certain
topics and grade levels. Further, since these tools are
meant only to assess students’ understanding of par-
ticular subject matter — and not to provide insight
into their differing values, experiences, and personal
goals — it remains to be seen whether their use will
benefi t all students equitably. It could very well be
the case that such tools are indifferent to students’
racial, ethnic, or gender identities, emerging bilin-
gualism, conditions of poverty, and other important
dimensions of students’ lives.

#4. Sociocultural formative assessment

Sociocultural interventions share with the socio-
cognitive approach many of the same research-based
premises about the social nature of learning and de-
velopment, as well as a focus on student participation
in disciplinary ways of knowing and doing. The two
theories of learning diverge, however, in terms of
how they account for students’ diversity. In short,
sociocultural approaches more explicitly allow for
students to engage with academic content and prac-
tices through differing entry points and to follow
differing pathways to mastery.

Sociocultural theories of learning recognize that

when students arrive at school, they bring with them
important knowledge and interests that should in-
form curriculum and instruction. Rather than cur-
ricula or instructional practices that ignore students’
experiences, teachers ought to help students refl ect
on how the school’s ways of knowing, doing, and be-
ing relate to the practices that are valued in their own
families and communities (Bang & Medin, 2010). A
key purpose for assessment, then, is to elicit infor-
mation about students’ experiences and help them
relate their own interests and goals for learning to
becoming a part of a disciplinary community.

One promising example is the Bellevue-University
of Washington Curriculum Redesign Partnership,
which takes units of study from the district’s elemen-
tary science curriculum and repurposes them, alter-
ing them in ways that give students more agency in
the classroom and that tap into their diverse interests
in the given topics. For instance, some units have
been redesigned to build on students’ knowledge
about their communities, such as by using photog-
raphy to document the everyday lives of the people
who live there (Clark-Ibañez, 2004). At the begin-
ning of a unit on microbes and health, for example,
students take photos of activities they do in daily life
to prevent disease and stay healthy. Then they share
these photos in class as a way to bring personally rel-
evant experiences into the classroom as they launch
the unit. Their documentation also helps shape a
student-led investigation focused on students’ own
questions, which are refi ned as students encounter
key ideas in microbiology.

Using students’ interests, experiences, and knowl-
edge is an important strategy in equitable instruc-
tion. In order to become an integral part of balanced
systems of assessment, however, sociocultural inter-
ventions like the one implemented in Bellevue will
need to be embraced by a wide range of stakeholders.
To this end, educators and researchers need to com-
municate with families and other educational stake-
holders about the value of this approach to teaching
and how its outcomes can be mapped onto familiar
disciplinary standards and learning goals.

conclusion: Start with local curriculum and
instruction

Under ESSA, states and districts have the oppor-
tunity to build coherent systems in which formative
assessments are codeveloped and integrated with lo-
cal curricula, instruction, and professional learning
— all of which are grounded in the same research-
based model of learning.

It will also be critical to design for coherence be-
tween local and state-level models of learning when
possible or to acknowledge when a shared model of
learning is not possible because of limitations in the

many state and district education
leaders are exploring new ways to
collect information about student
learning, as well as new ways
to use that information.

52 Kappan March 2017

(2003). Assessment for learning: Putting it into practice.

Buckingham, UK: Open University

Press.

Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom

learning. Assessment in Education, 5 (1), 7-74.

Clark-Ibañez, M. (2004). Framing the social world with photo-

elicitation interviews. The Behavioral Scientist, 47 (12), 1507-

1527.

Deming, W.E. (1986). Out of the crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.

diSessa, A.A. (1988). Knowledge in pieces. In G. Forman & P.

Pufall (Eds.), Constructivism in the computer age (Vol. 49-70).

Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Elmore, R.F. (2003). Accountability and capacity. In M. Carnoy,

R.F. Elmore, & L.S. Siskin (Eds.), The new accountability: High

schools and high-stakes testing (pp. 195-209). New York, NY:

Routledge Falmer.

Gravemeijer, K. (2004). Local instruction theories as means

of support for teachers in reform mathematics education.

Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 6 (2), 105-128.

Pellegrino, J.W., Wilson, M.R., Koenig, J.A., & Beatty,

A.S., (Eds.) (2014). Developing assessments for the next

generation science standards. Washington, DC: National

Academies Press.

Penuel, W.R., DeBarger, A.H., Boscardin, C.K., Moorthy, S.,

Beauvineau, Y., Kennedy, C., & Allison, K. (2017). Investigating

science curriculum adaptation as a strategy to improve

teaching and learning. Science Education, 101 (1), 66-98.

Penuel, W.R. & Shepard, L.A. (2016). Assessment and

teaching. In D.H. Gitomer & C.A. Bell (Eds.), Handbook of

research on teaching (pp. 787-850). Washington, DC: AERA.

Senge, P. (1990). The fi fth discipline: The art and practice of

the learning organization. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Shepard, L.A., Davidson, K.L., & Bowman, R. (2011).

How middle school mathematics teachers use interim and

benchmark assessment data. CSE Technical Report 807. Los

Angeles, CA: National Center for Research on Evaluation,

Standards, and Student Testing.

Simon, M.A. (1995). Reconstructing mathematics pedagogy

from a constructivist perspective. Journal for Research in

Mathematics Education, 26 (2), 114-145.

Smith, C.L., Wiser, M., Anderson, C.W., & Krajcik, J. (2006).

Implications of research on children’s learning for standards

and assessment: A proposed learning progression for

matter and the atomic-molecular theory. Measurement:

Interdisciplinary Research & Perspective, 4 (1&2), 1-98.

model implied by state tests. Painful lessons from the
past remind us that creating a coherent and effec-
tive assessment system between classroom and state-
house does not mean building a single instrument to
serve both formative and summative purposes. In
the 1990s, reformers seized upon the idea of creat-
ing large-scale “tests worth teaching to,” which were
meant to drive instructional improvements even as
they collected accountability data. Suffi ce it to say
that this did not work as planned. To be valid, reli-
able, and affordable, state accountability tests must
be standardized, and this often makes them ill-suited
to serve as models for high-quality teaching and
learning at the local level.

A wiser approach, we believe, would be to start
not with statewide accountability tests as the primary
driver of educational reform but to begin, instead,
with local decisions about curriculum and instruc-
tional practices, informed by small-scale (and usually
low-stakes) assessments that are grounded in a single,
coherent model of learning that is consistent with
contemporary research fi ndings about cognition,
child development, motivation, identity formation,
and equity-focused instruction. K

References

Bang, M. & Medin, D. (2010). Cultural processes in

science education: Supporting the navigation of multiple

epistemologies. Science Education, 94 (6), 1008-1026.

Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B., & Wiliam, D.

the most powerful assessment
tasks engage students in the
genuine practices of the given
content area.