It's Time for More Focus on Educator Involvement in Developing and Using Learning Progressions

Black, Wilson, and Yao have identified a very real tension felt by teachers today that has been created by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the United States and the National Curriculum Assessment in the United Kingdom. In many schools, formative assessment has either taken a backseat to summative assessment use, or many of the formative assessment resources commercially available to teachers promote the use of assessments that are neither formative nor useful to students and teachers to improve learning. In their article, Black et al. have begun to make critical connections among aspects of pedagogy and the central role that empirically based learning progressions might play in design of instruction and assessment. In this commentary, the author briefly addresses three issues essential to educator use of learning progressions if they are to become true road maps to designing and monitoring learning over time: (1) development time; (2) professional development; and (3) the "so what" or goals of learning: building understanding of the big ideas of the discipline.