Blogs on Comprehensive Assessment

This is the second part of a two-part entry. Read part one.

In many of our schools, we have stopped giving our students real creative challenges because there is not enough time for anything open ended. Open-ended projects, by their very design, allow students to explore a wide variety of interests, concepts, and skills. That means we can't easily assess these projects with a multiple-choice test; therefore, schools suffer when they pursue them.

This is the second post in a two-part entry. Click here to go to part one.

This is the second post in a three-part entry. Read part one and part three.

How do you respond in your classroom to a societal, medical, or environmental concern? Here's the next step in planning how to use such a problem as a springboard for a class project.

One day, the mother of one of my fourth-grade students came in to meet with me about her son. She reported that Noah, who I knew to be extremely bright, was bored with math. Although my school district's textbooks included problem-solving activities and stories, and I augmented the curriculum with various exercises that required students to apply creativity and higher-order thinking skills, the assignments, she told me, were still too easy for him.