Designing Middle and High School Instruction and Assessment: Using the Cognitive Domain

While today’s curriculum is largely driven by standards, many teachers find the lack of specificity in the standards to be confounding and even intimidating. Now this practical book provides middle and high school teachers with explicit guidance on designing specific objectives and developing appropriate formative and summative assessments to guide instruction. The authors present an accessible model for developing unit and daily lesson plan objectives based on state and national content standards. Providing detailed examples for each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, including synthesis and evaluation, the book covers the major forms of assessment that allow teachers to measure students’ understanding and mastery of the objectives. Teachers will learn how to: Unwrap state and national standards Understand how objectives and test items provide evidence of a particular level of knowledge Write measurable objectives for unit and daily lesson plans Develop appropriate assessments in the content areas This easy-to-follow resource gives teachers the tools to write specific, standards-based objectives and find the perfect assessments to measure their students’ progress! Acknowledgments About the Authors Introduction 1. Deconstructing the Standards 2. Writing Unit and Daily Instructional Objectives 3. Writing True-False and Completion Items and Matching Exercises 4. Writing Multiple-Choice Items 5. Writing Short-Answer and Essay Items 6. Performance-Based Assessment 7. Portfolios 8. Conclusion References and Further Readings Index