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Product Description Assessments that improve the speed and quality of learning―fully updated for teacher teams! In this expanded, all-new edition, author Larry Ainsworth provides a system of intentionally aligned components (standards, instruction, assessments, and data analysis) that all work together to improve student learning. Readers will learn to: Build the "highway" to aligned assessments Decide the learning intentions and student success criteria for a unit of study Evaluate and revise assessment questions for quality Plan the learning progressions for students to attain the learning intentions Create quick progress checks to coincide with the learning progressions Use assessment results as feedback to adjust instruction and student learning strategies Upgrade your CFAs using CFA 2.0! CFA 2.0 is so much more than assessment design. It shows teachers how they can intentionally align standards, instruction, assessment, and data analysis in every unit of study. Review "Formative assessment’s essence is its reliance on evidence-informed judgments about the need for instructional adjustments. Ainsworth relied on an analogous strategy in refining the recommendations he made in 2006 regarding common formative assessments. Based on nearly a decade’s worth of real-world evidence obtained by watching educators implement those earlier suggestions, Ainsworth has clearly refined his thinking about group-guided formative assessment. To most of us, a designation of 2.0 represents a "new and improved" version of whatever’s being described. Well, in every sense of its definitely deserved designation, this powerful book represents Common Formative Assessments 2.0." -- W. James Popham Published On: 2015-01-05 "One of the hardest tasks for teachers is to align pre- and post- classroom assessments to best measure the change or progress made between two occasions. Such assessments need to have questions anchored on a common scale (i.e., whatever is measured on each occasion should be the same construct) and anchored on a common difficulty scale. Larry Ainsworth spells out how classroom teachers can work together to create such tasks, which allows a major focus, as it should, on using progress to help monitor learning and adapt teaching. The new material in this book is critical to its value: Ainsworth introduces constructive alignment of learning objectives, standards, success criteria, classroom and larger-scale assessments, and emphasizes the quality of assessments leading to excellent diagnostic interpretations of data. He does not ask teachers to do all this alone but in a community of experts led by instructional leaders (the chapter on PLCs is worth buying the book in itself). He does all of this with the intention of maximizing our positive impact on student learning. There have been many who have written about the power of success criteria, growth and progress, and assessment for teachers, but not how to do it. Ainsworth spells it out to perfection. It seems so obvious―create the pre- and post- measures as part of the lesson planning, then make the links between pre- and post- and this is the learning progression. So why do we not do this? Because it requires a major transformation in how we think about our role―no longer just teach and then see how well the students listened to us by creating an assessment at the end focused on what we covered. Changing this thinking is the power of this book. There are so many gems in this book. For example, Ainsworth is not talking about ‘tests’ but about ‘tasks,’ which opens up so many more possibilities. The sections on the qualities of measures are directed to classroom tasks, and the many varied examples based on the Common Core will make it so much more practicable for teachers using those standards to implement many of the major purposes of the nationally consistent curriculum." -- John Hattie Published On: 2015-02-20 About the Author Larry Ainsworth is the author or coauthor of numerous pu