I was expecting more from this, but I did like the rubrics. I don't do a lot of art in my fourth grade class (we do trades between the three classes, and another teacher handles the weekly art), so I'd have to tweak them to make them useful for the areas that I cover. ( )

Creating products is the latest direction in education. This gives students of different learning styles the opportunity to illustrate their knowledge. Products can be kinesthetic, oral, technological, technological, visual, or written. There are literally hundreds of ways students can express their newly found knowledge. This book contains hundreds of great checklists for use evaluating student products. This is basically anything you would need to assess student products. ( )

I received this book free from early reviews for an honest review. As an elementary level teacher I thought the book did a nice job explaining the importance of using student products. The number of examples of student products were broken into five different learning styles, kinesthetic (ie. inventions, masks, board games), oral (ie. skit, speech, storytelling), technological (ie. podcast, powerpoint, prezi) and visual (ie. pamphlet, cartoon, poster) and written (ie. essay, interview, journal). I think that the DAP tools are a little too wordy for the younger grade levels and would need to be recreated for younger grade levels. The back of the book also had many examples of collecting student reflections. I loved this section but once again feel that a teacher would need to revamp them to make it more child friendly for the younger grades. ( )

A great book full of ideas to give reviewers ways to analyze products designed to aid in differentiated instruction. I work in Secondary education but this book was still very helpful to me and many other staff have also looked it over. We often find ourselves overwhelmed with many different ways to adjust our instruction for different learning needs, but this book looks more at the products and how to judge their usefulness. It had many ideas I had not thought about. ( )

As an upper elementary teacher, I talk to my students every day about their futures. I always try to link what we are working on in class with the work they will one day do in their chosen career paths. This text is a perfect companion to my goals as a teacher. It provides concrete suggestions for designing assessments that support ongoing learning in an authentic way. Many teachers, including myself, often feel trapped into using traditional paper-and-pencil multiple choice tests to assess student learning since this is how the state test measures their performance. This text helped me understand that just like I want my kids to connect our classroom work with their futures, I need to reinforce that connection by aligning my assessment with their futures. I highly recommend using this book if you are an educator looking to vary your means of assessment so that it is more engaging, motivating, practical, and at the same time accomplishes your goal of effectively measuring what your students have learned. ( )