Glossary of Terms
Competency: a broad statement of key learning that all students will master; focuses instruction on the most foundational, enduring, and leveraged concepts and skills within a discipline
Essential Questions: broad questions that when answered lead to an essential understanding. These are questions that are not answerable with finality in a single lesson or a brief sentence—and that's the point. Their aim is to stimulate thought, to provoke inquiry, and to spark more questions, including thoughtful student questions, not just pat answers.
- Is open-ended; that is, it typically will not have a single, final, and correct answer.
- Is thought-provoking and intellectually engaging, often sparking discussion and debate.
- Calls for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, prediction. It cannot be effectively answered by recall alone.
- Points toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines.
- Raises additional questions and sparks further inquiry.
- Requires support and justification, not just an answer.
- Recurs over time; that is, the question can and should be revisited again and again.
Example: Is there ever a "just" war?
Essential Understandings: key ideas
Focus (content) Questions: Questions focused on specific content to be answered. Can be answered in a lesson or two. Can be found and or uncovered by learning content.
Example: What key event sparked World War I?
Formative Assessment: detailed information that educators can use to improve instruction and student learning while it’s happening. In other words, formative assessments are often said to be for learning, while summative assessments are of learning. Assessment expert Paul Black puts it, “When the cook tastes the soup, that’s a formative assessment. When the customer tastes the soup, that’s a summative assessment.” Formative assessments are ungraded tasks that are used to inform both the teacher and student of strengths, weaknesses and next steps. Formatives are also readiness checks. They measure a piece of an indicator (learning target) not an entire indicator.
Habits of Work: identified traits or behaviors that promote and are essential to learning. These traits or behaviors are assessed separate from academic learning.
Interim Assessment: given at periodic times during a unit to formally check understanding of several learning targets and an entire indicator. Examples of interim assessments may be quizzes, constructed responses, etc.
Learning Targets: day to day learning measuring a piece of an indicator. Assessed through multiple and varied formative assessments.
Performance Indicators: demonstration of learning students will do to meet the standard; measurable. Performance indicators provide more specific descriptions of what it means to meet a content area standard. When students engage in a summative assessment aligned with a particular standard, they are assessed at the performance indicator level.
Proficiency: demonstration of student performance on each performance indicator of a standard against detailed scoring criteria.
Scoring Criteria: a set of descriptors of the various levels of proficiency for each performance indicator related to the standards.
Summative Assessment: used to evaluate student learning, skill acquisition, and academic achievement at the conclusion of a defined instructional period—typically at the end of a project, unit, course, semester, program, or school year; they are generally evaluative, rather than diagnostic. What makes an assessment “summative” is not the design of the test, assignment, or self-evaluation, per se, but the way it is used—i.e., to determine whether and to what degree students have learned the material they have been taught.