Dr. Victor Sampson

A department chair sent me this in September, which is exactly when it tends to arrive. A school picks a focus, the focus is a good one, and then someone has to figure out how to put a number next to it by the end of the semester. Before the measurement, a minute on the thing being measured, because sensemaking is one of those words that gets adopted much faster than it gets defined, and a department that has not defined it will end up with a rubric that quietly measures participation. Start...

A teacher asked me this at a conference and then added, a little apologetically, that she was sick of them too. I want to reframe the problem slightly, because I do not think the issue is the number of assessments. I think it is that every one of them is the same event. Desks cleared. Silence. A packet. Points. A grade a week later. No reason to look at it again. What students are sick of is that experience, not measurement, and that experience is not required by measurement. If an assessment...

A teacher sent this in after a data meeting, and I want to give the direct answer first, because I think it is the most useful thing I can say. You cannot. Item-level data from a benchmark test genuinely cannot support a reteaching decision, because a right answer arrived at for a wrong reason and a wrong answer arrived at through sound reasoning look identical in that data. That is not a complaint about your particular benchmark. It is a description of what that kind of data is, and no...