Marianne Reale

Formative assessment is a process that engages teachers and students in gathering, interpreting, and using evidence about what and how students are learning in order to facilitate further student learning during a short period of time. The process offers the potential to guide educator decisions about midstream adjustments to instruction that address learner needs in a timely manner. Formative assessment can be implemented in classrooms in various ways. For example, formative assessment can b...

The importance of teacher effectiveness is well supported by studies that document variation in teachers' abilities to contribute to student achievement gains. All else being equal, students taught by some teachers experience greater achievement gains than do students taught by other teachers. In response to initiatives to increase educator effectiveness as directed through flexibility waivers under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, many states are implementing new teacher evaluatio...

Recent federal initiatives such as School Improvement Grants and Elementary and Secondary Education Act flexibility emphasize the role of state education agencies in improving chronically low-performing schools. But state policies limit what actions state education agencies can take. As state education leaders and policymakers consider how best to intervene to improve these schools, they may wish to learn about the policies in other states. This report summarizes current policies in all 50 st...

This toolkit, developed by Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Central in collaboration with York Public Schools in Nebraska, provides a process and tools to help teachers use data from their classroom assessments to evaluate promising practices. The toolkit provides teachers with guidance on how to deliberately apply and study one classroom strategy over the course of one unit and systematically document and compare results to consider the effects of a given instructional strategy on stude...

This report presents a survey tool, developed by REL Central at Marzano Research, designed to gather information from teachers about their perceptions of and responses to evaluator feedback. District or state administrators can use this survey to systematically collect teacher perceptions on five key aspects of evaluation feedback: (1) feedback usefulness, (2) feedback accuracy, (3) evaluator credibility, (4) access to resources related to feedback, and (5) teacher response to feedback. The s...