RMA is back!

After an extended hiatus, Re-Mediating Assessment is back.  In the meantime, lots has happened.  Michelle Honeyford completed her PhD and joined the faculty at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.  Jenna McWilliam has moved on to Joshua Danish's lab and is focusing more directly critical theory in new media contexts.  She renamed her blog too.

Lots of other things have happened that my student and I will be writing about.  I promise to write shorter posts and focus more on commentary regarding assessment-related events.  I have a bunch of awesome new doctoral students and collaborations who are lined up to start posting regularly about assessment-related issues.


For now I want to let everybody know that today is the official release day of a new volume on formative assessment that Penny Noyce and I edited.  It has some great chapters.  On the Harvard Education Press website announcing the book, my assessment hero Dylan Wiliam said:

"This is an extraordinary book. The chapters cover practical applications of formative assessment in mathematics, science, and language arts, including the roles of technology and teachers’ professional learning. I found my own thinking about formative assessment constantly being stretched and challenged. Anyone who is involved in education will find something of value in this book."

Lorrie Shepard's foreword is a nice update on the state of assessment.  David Foster writes about using the tools from Mathematics Assessment Resources Services in the Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative Dan Damelin and Kimberle Koile from the Concord Consortium write about using formative assessment with cutting edge technology. (And we appreciate that the Concord Consortium is featuring their book on their website.

For me the best part was the chapter from Paul Horwitz of the Concord Consortium.  Paul wrote a nice review of his work with Thinker Tools and GenScope and the implications of that work for assessment.  Paul's chapter provided a nice context for me to summarize my ten year collaboration with him around GenScope.  That chapter is perhaps the most readable description of participatory assessment that I have managed to write.  A much more detailed account of our collaboration was just accepted for publication by the Journal of the Learning Sciences and will appear in 2011.

I promise you will be hearing from us regularly starting in the new year.  We hope you will comment and share this with others.  And if you have posts or links that you think we should comment on, please let us know.  I will let the rest of the team introduce themselves and add their bios to the blog as they start posting.