Classroom Assessment

About our author James Popham has spent the bulk of his educational career as a teacher. His first teaching assignment, for example, was in a small eastern Oregon high school where he taught English and social studies while serving as yearbook advisor, class sponsor and unpaid tennis coach. The recompense meshed well with the quality of his coaching.Most of Dr. Popham's teaching career took place at UCLA where, for nearly 30 years, he taught courses in instructional methods for prospective teachers as well as courses in evaluation and measurement for graduate students. At UCLA he won several distinguished teaching awards. In January 2000, he was recognized by UCLA Today as one of the university's top 20 professors of the twentieth century. (He notes that the twentieth century was a full-length century, unlike the current abbreviated one.) In 1992, he took early retirement from UCLA upon learning that emeritus professors received free parking.Because at UCLA he was acutely aware of the perishability of professors who failed to publish, he spent his non-teaching hours affixing words to paper. The result: over 30 books, 200 journal articles, 50 research reports and 175 papers presented before research societies. Although not noted in his official vita, while at UCLA he also authored 1,426 grocery lists.His most recent books are Transformative Assessment (2008); Instruction That Measures Up (2009); Transformative Assessment in Action (2011); Mastering Assessment (2011, Pearson); Unlearned Lessons (2009, Harvard Education Press); Everything School Leaders Need to Know About Assessment (2010); and Evaluating America's Teachers: Mission Possible? (2013, Corwin). He encourages purchase of these books because he regards their semi-annual royalties as psychologically reassuring.In 1968, Dr. Popham established IOX Assessment Associates, an R&D group that formerly created statewide student achievement tests for a dozen states. He has personally passed all those tests, largely because of his unlimited access to the tests' answer keys.

• Why Do Teachers Need to Know About Assessment?Deciding What to AssessReliability of AssessmentValidityFairnessSelected-Response TestsConstructed-Response TestsPerformance AssessmentPortfolio AssessmentAffective AssessmentImproving Teacher-Developed AssessmentsFormative AssessmentMaking Sense Out of Standardized Test ScoresAppropriate and Inappropriate Test-Preparation PracticesThe Evaluation of InstructionAssessment-Based GradingGlossaryIndex