In a recent Grunwald Associates study on formative assessment perceptions one of the areas we looked into was what subject areas parents and educators thought was important to measure. What we found was that parents and educators alike think it’s important to measure student performance in a full range of subjects – and in the higher-order thinking skills that will be critical to success in life.

Parents, teachers and district administrators believe that it is important to measure higher-order skills, like problem solving, critical thinking, communication, creativity and innovation, across a wide range of academic subjects including the arts and world languages.

Many parents, teachers and district administrators also believe that it’s important to measure student competencies in specialized content areas such as information technology and media literacy, economic and business literacy, and health and environmental literacy.

So the message seems clear… that formative assessment that simply focuses on English and mathematics is falling short of expectations. Is STEM the answer? Regardless of which side of the table you’re on, formative assessment needs to go beyond English and mathematics to measure student skills more broadly. What do you think?

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