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New publication shares ways to design authentic assessments to measure deep learning

By April 9, 2024No Comments

April 2024 | In this new McREL two-page publication for the Michigan Assessment Consortium, McREL’s CEO Bryan Goodwin explains how the science of learning can be applied to create authentic assessments that help measure how well students convert new learning into long-term memory. For new knowledge to stick in our long-term memory, research shows that students “need to engage with new learning multiple times and in multiple ways spread over time,” he writes. Typical classroom assessments can fail to support these practices because they often follow a teach­­–study–test model, which emphasizes fast learning and leads to fast forgetting. The publication then shares three learning tasks that can support deeper learning and four suggestions for teachers interested in designing authentic assessments. Read the paper here.

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McREL is a non-profit, non-partisan education research and development organization that since 1966 has turned knowledge about what works in education into practical, effective guidance and training for teachers and education leaders across the U.S. and around the world.