This ASCD Study Guide is meant to enhance your understanding of Classroom Assessment and Grading That Work , an ASCD book written by Robert J. Marzano and published in December 2006. In the book, Marzano distills 35 years of research to bring you expert advice on the best practices for assessing and grading the work done by today's students.

The questions that follow are designed to enhance your understanding of the book and to help you make connections between the text and the school and school district in which you work. You may use the study guide before or after you have read the book, or as you finish each chapter. The study questions provided are not meant to cover all aspects of the book but, rather, to address specific ideas that might warrant further reflection.

Although most of the questions contained in this study guide are ones that you can think about on your own, consider pairing with a colleague or forming a study group with others who have read (or are reading) Classroom Assessment and Grading That Work .

The push to improve academic achievement has been around for more than 100 years in the United States, where state standards have been adopted by 49 states. No doubt academic achievement concerns students, parents, educators, and the community at large where you live. With or without standards, within or outside the United States, every child should be learning. What they should be learning, how best to teach the content, and assessing that learning is important to everyone, particularly educators, throughout the world. Please forgive the emphasis on U.S. standards in this study guide. The ideas explored herein are applicable to many different environments, no matter where you live.

Chapter 1. The Case for Classroom Assessment

1. What factors affect student achievement? List the classroom factors, separating those factors that can be controlled in the school environment from those factors that cannot be controlled by the school.
2. What do highly effective classroom teachers do inside and outside the classroom that make a difference?
3. Why do you think classroom assessment is important? Can feedback both positively and negatively affect student learning? How can you assess your students' work and give feedback so that it positively affects their learning? Consider what you know about drive theory and attribution theory.
4. Do you use both formative and summative assessments in your classroom? Why or why not? Give examples of when you use each to your students' best advantage.
5. What components are most critical to sound feedback?

Chapter 2. The Role of State Standards

1. How do standards affect what you teach in your classroom? How do they affect what you assess in your classroom? Do you find standards to be a hindrance or a help in teaching students and assessing their understanding? Why?
2. Does your school or district offer guidance in teaching your state's standards? If not, can you make a difference at the school level? How can you work toward clarifying the specific materials and assessments that are needed and most helpful for students (and teachers)?
3. What is unidimensionality? Do you address unidimensionality in your classroom assessments? How?
4. Can your school or school district take steps to design measurement topics, derived from the state standards? How can you promote the idea of measurement topics to your school community? What can you do to get stakeholder buy-in?

Chapter 3. A Scale That Measures Learning over Time

1. Make a list of a few common assessment systems. Consider the differences among them and the problems you have, if any, with each one. What do you like best about each type of assessment? For example, do they measure growth of each student's knowledge individually? Do they measure this year's group of students against last year's group? Do they measure what a particular student has learned in the course of the unit, semester, and year?
2. Consider the scores for students in figures 3.1 and 3.2 (pp. 31-32) and the overall discussion. Do point assignments and assessments that rely on them seem appropriate? Should the assessments that you administer overcome these sorts of inter-rater differences? Is that possible?

Chapter 4. Designing Classroom Assessments

1. Make a list of the measurement topics you plan to address in the upcoming grading period. How many assessments will you administer for each topic? As you answer these questions, decide if you will address more than one topic in each assessment.
2. Is it feasible for you to use common assessments (a.k.a. benchmark assessments) as final examinations? Does this practice make sense for your students? For your school or district? Why or why not?
3. Consider your next classroom assessment. If it's already drafted, does it include the three types of ideal assessment tasks and items? (Use the information on pp. 62-64 to evaluate it.) If it's not already written, use the questions and information on pp. 62-64 to help you devise the assessment.
4. Think about the next few weeks of assessment in your classroom. Will there be opportunities for your students to show you what they know as in the form of forced choice items and tasks? Short, written responses? Essays? Oral responses and oral reports? Demonstrations and performances? Reconsider your assessments, if necessary, to incorporate as many of these assessments as possible. Help colleagues investigate ways to use these assessments.

Chapter 5. Assessments That Encourage Learning

1. What three assessment techniques have been proven to encourage learning?
2. What self-assessment practices can you use in your classroom? Is it practical to include an opportunity for students to use journals as vehicles for reflection? Can you provide a basic chart for students to record their scores on assessments? Can you include a column on the chart for students to assign their own scores?
3. Is a "minute paper" more appropriate than a journal for your students and classroom? What about using a technique related to the "muddiest point"?
4. Is averaging a student's scores on multiple assessments a true picture of his learning? Doesn't a low score on an early quiz and a high score on a final test, for example, indicate that the student has learned and has mastery of the content? Why would the early quiz lower his final score or overall class grade? Is that appropriate? Does a low score on an early quiz and high score on a final assessment mean that he should have a lower score than the student who walked into the class already having mastered the content? Consider the possibility that each student had identical scores on the final assessment.
5. Although many elementary report cards have areas for assessing life skills and behavior, the opportunity for teachers to address these skill areas drops considerably on middle school and high school report cards — often to perfunctory levels or worse. Should these areas be addressed by teachers in your school? As you think about the whole child, consider the rise in school violence incidents, interest in character education programs, and the basic mission and vision of your school or district.

Chapter 6. Final Scores and Grades

1. Is it feasible to expect individual teachers or groups of teachers to set up master grade books to track specific measurement topics? Or is it more realistic for the school or district to purchase software to take on that task? Consider the implications that will affect the use of the assessment system, including reliability factors and availability of resources (including financial and personnel time and training).
2. Consider the traditional use of letter grades and how that affects the performance of your students. Contrast that with the necessity of translating assessment outcomes to parents, other schools, colleges, and the community.

Chapter 7. Report Cards and the Future of Standards-Based or Topic-Based Schooling

1. Hybrid report cards that show traditional letter grades along with scores on each measurement topic may be a bridge to changing report cards from a time-honored icon in most U.S. schools to a useful reporting tool. Consider the option of adopting such a system, as shown in Figure 7.1, p. 127-128. How would your teachers, school, and district adopt and revise such a report card?
2. Would the phases outlined in the chapter work for your school? How would they need to be adapted?
3. If you've read and studied the book, clearly you are looking to make changes to the assessment and grading systems in your school or district. Are the existing problems, information gleaned from this book, and the results from the Chugach students convincing enough for your school to make the transition to formative classroom assessments? Why or why not?

Classroom Assessment and Grading That Work was written by Robert J. Marzano. This 189-page, 7" x 9" book (Stock #106006; ISBN-13: 978-1-4166-0422-8; ISBN-10: 1-4166-0422-7) is available from ASCD for $21.95 (ASCD member) or $27.95 (nonmember). Copyright © 2006 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. To order a copy of this book or related ASCD resources, call ASCD at 1-800-933-2723 (in Virginia 1-703-578-9600) and press 2 for the Service Center. Or buy the book from ASCD's Online Store.