Title: An Assessment Exercise

Tests send messages to teachers and students as to the content that is most important to be learned. Tests can be more or less aligned to state and professional content standards and instruction can be more or less aligned to tests and/or standards. But, tests consist of collections of items (tasks). Tools have been developed to provide analytic powerful descriptions of the content messages of tests and standards. Tools also have been developed for describing the alignment among instruction, assessment and standards. These tools will be discussed. Participants will use the tools to content analyze a test.