ASCD Blog: McTighe on Making Assessments Meaningful makes a point that by the very nature of our profession as educators, we are ( or should be) interested in assessment, as an indicator of learning taking place in our classrooms.  His indicators of meaningful assessments are the same as we have been talking about in various high school professional development sessions, either locally, or those provided by our area education agency.  They include:

  Making assessments meaningful should also include pre-assessing, to determine the current skill level before beginning a new concept.  Why make students sit through material they already know and can easily master, when so much other material is available?  The clear learning targets would show what they need to work toward at each new level, and make differentiation that much easier. Giving advanced students extra work that is not directed toward specific learning targets is not serving their needs as a learner.

The comments so far on this blog article indicate that at least some teachers feel too much emphasis is placed on assessment already.  I don’t think McTighe is necessarily talking about formal, pencil and paper, standardized assessments.  I think he is talking about the questions we ask to check for understanding and the observations we are already making on a daily basis.  We just need to document this data a little better so that our next assessment will be measuring growth, rather than stagnation.