Ambitious Teaching and Formative Assessment: Creating Conditions for Equity

Remote and online learning is surfacing existing inequities in schools and classrooms across the country and is raising critical questions about how we support students to develop the agency and autonomy required for learning.

This recorded session is the first in a series of online conversations, Perspectives on Formative Assessment, Student Agency, and Equity, that highlights both scholarly and practitioner perspectives on the intersections between student identity, classroom culture, and formative assessment as levers for promoting agency and equity.

Led by WestEd’s Nancy Gerzon and Barbara Jones, these conversations explore emerging ideas, practices, and research, and professional contributions to the study and promotion of student agency.

This archived session features Lorrie Shepard, University Distinguished Professor and Dean Emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education. Her research focuses on psychometrics and the use and misuse of tests in educational settings. She has led research on the use of assessment and testing in a wide range of testing areas, including the effects of high-stakes accountability testing, grade retention, teacher testing, and the use of classroom assessment to support teaching and learning.

In 2019, in preparation for the National Council of Measurement in Education Special Conference on Classroom Assessment, she and her colleagues convened national experts to develop Classroom Assessment Principles to Support Teaching and Learning, a publication that describes how classroom assessment can best be enacted to support deep learning. These principles provide a framework for teachers, leaders, and policymakers to develop new conditions for learning that foster student agency and self-regulation.

View additional session recordings from this series.