Assessing Student Learning

Graded School recognizes that teaching, learning, and assessment are deeply linked. Students and teachers work in partnership to enable students to demonstrate what they have learned, assess their progress, and identify specific strategies to maximize their potential on class assessments to demonstrate learning.

We are guided by the following:

• We believe that, like instruction, effective assessment is appropriate, engaging, targeted toward specific learning outcomes, and challenging.
• Assessments come in many types - diagnostic, formative, and summative - and serve different purposes.
• Assessments should be well-structured and differentiated, often requiring collaboration amongst different learners.
• Meaningful assessment requires a variety of tools, including informal checks in class, observation and student dialogue, self-assessment, peer feedback and assessment, formal quizzes and tests, academic prompts, project-based assignments, and open-ended assessment tasks.
• Quality assessment is authentic and transparent, providing students with a fair and attainable venue to proudly exhibit what they have learned.
• Assessment serves improvement.