The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards (WMAS) articulate what students should know and be able to do in each curricular area. Community leaders and staff in the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) elaborated upon these state standards to frame district curriculum and instruction.

Curriculum can be thought of as the planned educational experiences taught in each subject area at each grade level. Standards-based instruction focuses on teaching the knowledge and skills which support students' continual progress toward meeting the standards.

This article focuses on assessment, the process of using multiple strategies to measure student learning.

The remainder of this article will use mathematics as an example of a content area to demonstrate the use of standards-based assessment. MMSD teachers assess the content standards (i.e., number and algebra) as well as the process standards (i.e., communication, problem solving, and reasoning).

Research indicates that in addition to quizzes and tests, a variety of daily assessment tools (i.e., questioning, observations, discussions, and presentations) are needed to create a more thorough picture of what a student understands.

The teacher's best chance to assess a student's level of understanding is through student explanations and justification of solutions to problems. These frequent assessments determine what students are thinking, how they are reasoning and what the next instructional steps should be. Such daily assessments give students feedback about their continuing progress and help students identify what they are expected to learn.

To obtain a current picture about a student's level of achievement at the end of a unit, math teachers employ different types of assessment items. When a student is learning the next level of a concept or skill, the teacher needs to know that the student can apply this concept or skill in all kinds of settings and that the student can correctly respond to a variety of items, such as selected-response and constructed-response.

Multiple choice (selected-response) items allow a student to select from answer choices. Short answer or essay (constructed-response) items require students to produce an answer and explain the strategy used, or develop a second strategy to solve the problem.

Additional information about MMSD K-12 Mathematics is available by clicking here. The three previous articles in this series can be found in the three previous editions of MMSD Today.

A future edition will address standards and the central role they play in reporting.