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With the increasing diversity in classrooms, teachers are faced with a broad range of students representing a wide variety of educational needs. To effectively address students' diverse education needs, teachers must engage in good decision making. This article explores the bidirectional relationship between differentiation and assessment through the lens of decision-making. Particularly, the article investigates the 3 phases of assessment-planning instruction, guiding instruction, and evaluating instruction. It also asks 4 questions: Why does assessment matter? What happens if it is misaligned with learning goals? How does the teacher use the assessment data? What does it look like? The article concludes with a summary of the 3 principle building blocks of differentiation-active learning, high expectations for students, social context of learning-and their implications for assessment.
Any teaching act is the result of a decision, whether conscious or unconscious, that the teacher makes after the complex cognitive processing of available information. This reasoning leads to the hypothesis that the basic teaching skill is decision making. (Shavelson, 1973, p. 18)
ALTHOUGH SHAVELSON HIGHLIGHTED the importance of decision making in teaching, he also emphasized that decision making occurs after the complex cognitive processing of available information. Thus, there is a connection between information and decision making. Although pointing out this connection seems obvious, it is important to note that different types of decisions require different types of information. How do teachers obtain information they will use to make decisions and how does that information allow a teacher to differentiate instruction?
Historically, assessment has been primarily used for determining placement of students, assigning grades, promotion to the next grade, or graduation. Current thinking has evolved to understand that student performance is at least a partial reflection of the quality of the curriculum and instruction. As a result, to meet the goals of education, there must be a tight alignment among curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
Assessment is appropriately seen as the process of observing student learning by collaborating with students to collect and interpret data about their academic strengths and weaknesses, interests, and learning preferences, with the goal of making decisions that benefit their instruction. Integral to a teacher making good decisions is the use of high-quality data. Two major concepts that affect the quality of data used by a...