The Next Generation of Testing by Bill Tucker

A few of my forward-thinking colleagues and I are currently hammering out collaborative assessment strategies for our 7th through 12th grade students.  I sure wish these technologies that Tucker writes of were available today!  The idea of being able to track a student's decisions and movements throughout the test is so appealing, in that we're trying to teach the process of learning and to find out whether or not we're effectively communicating a decision-making process that each student can really use. 

I think the key lies in Tucker's words, "successful changes to assessment will also require equally challenging revisions to standards, curriculum, instruction, and teacher training." We've got to seriously reconsider how we teach in order to avoid the huge temptation of teaching to a test.  Or maybe if the test is actually measuring a larger learning process, teaching to the test isn't so bad anymore!