By Dylan Wiliam, Ph.D. In May 2010, the members of the Common Core State Standards Validation Committee were asked to make a straight up-or-down decision about whether the Common Core State Standards met with their approval. Twenty members voted to approve the standards. One of the original 25 members had withdrawn from the committee a […]
By Dylan Wiliam In a 1984 paper, Benjamin Bloom reckoned that one-on-one tutorial instruction had an impact of two standard deviations on student achievement, but this claim is meaningless unless the sensitivity to instruction of the measure of achievement is specified. For example, standardized tests such as NAEP or TIMSS are relatively insensitive to instruction. […]
Content, Then Process In professional development, the details matter. And process should always come after content. In previous blog posts, I’ve written a lot about the content of formative assessment; namely the five key strategies and associated practical techniques. But now is the time to start thinking about the process. In other words, we have […]
By Dylan Wiliam Why I wrote my new book My latest book, written with Siobhán Leahy, is designed specifically to help individual teachers who want to develop their practice of formative assessment on their own or with small groups of colleagues. In this blog, I provide some suggestions for practical techniques you can try in […]
By Dylan Wiliam What Dance Teachers Know At Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, a high school jazz dance class is in session. The teacher has organized the dancers so each student is partnered. When Alannah Miles starts belting out “Black Velvet” from the speakers, partner #1 performs a complicated sequence of […]
In 38% of well-designed studies, feedback actually made performance worse—one of the most counterintuitive results in all of psychology. If there’s a single principle teachers need to digest about classroom feedback, it’s this: The only thing that matters is what students do with it. No matter how well the feedback is designed, if students do […]
