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School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

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What's The Research On...?

Educational Policy and Accountability Studies

    > Alignment

 Alignment critical to successful reform
The major elements of the education system, instruction and assessment, must be aligned, across criteria and across grade levels.

Measuring the content of instruction
Three kinds of tools for measuring the alignment of content and standards

Aligning assessments and standards
The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to align their performance standards and assessments. But correspondence between state-level standards and assessments tends to be only moderate, particularly in terms of ‘depth of knowledge’ and ‘range of knowledge.’ Based on years of working with standards and assessments, WCER Senior Scientist Norman Webb has designed a system for measuring the degree of alignment. Too often, Webb says, education systems are fragmented, so teachers and students get mixed messages about goals and expectations. In the absence of clear principles of alignment, learning expectations can be lowered for some students while being raised for others. That creates potential inequities.