Evidence of understanding in an 8th grade classroom.

1. What is the title of the project? Evidence of understanding in an 8th grade classroom.
2. What is the Question? How do we know students are learning?
 4. What strategy is being used to address? Assessments, through observation, dialogues, traditional quizzes and tests, performance tasks and projects, and students' self-assessments gathered over time
5. What evidence is presented that the strategy will work? Alfie Kohn describes as our propensity to do things "to" children rather than do things "with" children
 6. How will data be collected to determine if the strategy will work? Discussed as a class what the students needed to show as evidence for their understanding. Once the students decided on the standards, they spent the next few days reading and working on their evidence of understanding the texts. Through observations, interviews and class discussion, He documented the data.
7. How was the data analyzed? Students then presented their evidence to the class and we discussed whether their work "met standards" or not. This provoked many interesting discussions about what’s good evidence of understanding and the challenges of assessing their learning.
 8. What were the results? Students should be active, not passive. By being involved in the process, students were more focused on what they were supposed to be learning by providing evidence of what they learned rather than answering true or false.
 9. How do the results inform teacher practice? This informs teachers that there needs to be balance and freedom to asses in unique ways.