Making Standards Useful in the Classroom

Book excerpt: It's true that state standards often have way too much content and aren't written in a way that enhances classroom instruction and formative assessment. That's why this guide is invaluable for any educator who wants to ensure that standards actually lead to higher student achievement. The authors give you good reasons for why some content standards should be dropped and explain how benchmark statements in standards should be rewritten. Learn how to sequence content and set up grading scales that help facilitate formative assessment and effective instruction. And get clear steps for unpacking and converting standards into guidelines that are much more useful to classroom teachers. To implement this book's much more efficient approach, the authors included over 240 pages of detailed scoring scales and sample measurement topics for k-8 science, math, language arts, social studies, and critical life skills topics for elementary through high school students.