Formative Assessment Approaches to Inform Teacher Practices: Key Considerations

To guide data-based decision making in schools, it is important to focus not only on how to best measure students’ needs, but also on how to measure and integrate data on teacher practices. The purpose of this special issue is to describe and present findings from research on the measurement of teacher practices and approaches for facilitating and evaluating school personnel’s use of data to inform instructional decisions that promote student achievement. Two initial articles in this special issue focus on approaches for measuring teacher practices/processes. The following two articles describe structured technology-driven approaches for facilitating, investigating, and evaluating job-embedded teacher professional development in the form of coaching. A final article provides an illustrative example of the application of a measure for assessing teacher practices in the classroom. The special issue concludes with an expert commentary on this work and future directions for research and practice.