Informed Teaching

Written for professional educators, agency professionals, and pre-service teachers, Informed Teaching: Using Data to Improve Educational Performance helps readers understand how validity and assessment technical characteristics are involved in making accurate and appropriate inferences from scores, judgements, ratings, and other checks of student performance. 

Keeping in mind the overarching educational goal of supporting learning objectives and goals, the book uses a validity framework to address the complexity of assessment, including testing, measuring, evaluating, and both formative and summative predicting. Specific examples include assessment of phonological and morphological awareness, a developmental spelling inventory, a narrative writing rubric, an oral reading fluency sample, and a rubric for media-enhanced science education. Additional chapters are devoted to literacy promotion, particularly science literacy, and the value and utility of the MESPR. 

Informed Teaching is the rare textbook that actually allows readers to interact with samples and examples of assessments in order to practice understanding and interpreting validity types in a variety of contexts. The book is well-suited to graduate level courses in assessment and evaluation, and to in-service professional development.

Michael S. Mott earned his Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction at Mississippi State University and M.S. in education from Bank Street College of Education. Dr. Mott is an associate professor of teacher education and the coordinator of the master's program in literacy education at The University of Mississippi.

Denise A. Soares earned her Ph.D. in educational psychology at Texas A&M University, College Station. She is the assistant chair for the Department of Teacher Education, an assistant professor of special education, and the special education program coordinator at the University of Mississippi.

Susan S. McClelland earned her M.Ed. in English education and Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction at The University of Mississippi. She is an associate professor of leadership and counselor education as well as chair of the Department of Teacher Education.