Learning assessment and student outcomes

Assessment that teachers can act on

Large-scale assessments are essential for system-level accountability, but they are usually too slow and too aggregated to change one teacher's next lesson. Classroom-level assessment serves a different purpose: identifying which children have not yet reached a specific skill, while there is still time to teach it.

Systems that improve foundational learning quickly tend to run both, and are clear about which question each one answers.

• Simple enough for a teacher to administer routinely
• Specific to a skill, not a general grade
• Fast feedback, in time to change teaching
• Aggregable upward for district and state decisions

Measuring foundational literacy and numeracy

Foundational assessment usually checks oral reading fluency and comprehension, and number recognition, place value and basic operations. What is measured signals what is valued, so an assessment that tests only decoding will produce teaching that stops at decoding.

From measurement to action

Data only matters where someone is responsible for responding to it. The useful question for a system is not how much assessment data it collects, but which decision changes when the data changes.

Assessment runs through the Lab's sessions on implementation, and delegates can see how assessment is used in the classrooms they observe in Lucknow.

Common questions

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