This practical resource book will familiarize teachers, staff developers, and administrators with the latest thinking on alternatives to traditional assessment. It will prepare them to implement authentic assessment in the ESL/bilingual classroom and to incorporate it into instructional planning.
I realized after reading this book that this is where I got the idea to remove the option of multiple choice questions from tests. The book states that it assesses what the student does not know, instead of what they know. This is true. When I give tests in which the students can write a short constructed response, they preform better because they don't use words they don't know, or confuse a word with a similiar word and derive the wrong meaning.
There are lots of immediately usable assessment rubrics and guides in the text, making it a "keeper." While the text is somewhat repetitive in each chapter, the information is clearly presented and very useful. I would recommend this to any teacher who would like a basic text for assessing EL readers in their classroom.