Caroline Wylie
Senior Associate, National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, United States
Caroline Wylie, Ph.D., is a national expert on formative assessment, the role it plays within balanced assessment systems, and the learning support that teachers need to engage in these practices with their students.
Her research has focused on the use of formative assessment to improve classroom teaching and learning. She has led studies on the creation of effective, scalable and sustainable teacher professional development, the formative use of diagnostic questions for classroom-based assessment, and the role of learning progressions to support formative assessment in mathematics and science.
She is currently the principal investigator of an Institute of Education Sciences-funded project that explores rater quality for formative classroom observations, and a co-principal investigator on another IES-funded project that examines the formative use of process data and automated scoring to support middle school writing instruction.
Caroline is a co-leader of the Council of Chief State School Officers’ Balanced Assessment Collaborative, and a former leader of its formative assessment focused Collaborative. She has served on the Classroom Assessment Committee for the National Council on Measurement in Education.
Caroline is a co-author of a forthcoming chapter on supporting assessment literacy in a volume on Balanced Assessment Systems to be published by the National Academy of Education. She has published dozens of chapters and peer-reviewed articles, two co-authored books, and she regularly presents her work at the national conferences of the American Educational Research Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, and the Council of Chief State School Officers.
Caroline earned a Ph.D. from Queen’s University, Belfast, in assessment and standard-setting, and also earned a Postgraduate Certificate in Education there, with an emphasis on mathematics.
Keynote Address: Using Formative Assessment to Bridge Teaching and Learning
Teachers are inundated with assessment information including accountability assessments and international comparison data, along with classroom assessment data. Online assessments that use technology-enhanced items can provide process data in addition to information about correctly and incorrectly answered questions. To what extent can data from these formal assessments inform ongoing teaching and learning in the classroom? In this presentation I will explore how participants can help teachers make appropriate use of formal assessment data while also providing opportunities for professional learning about – and use of – formative assessment practices to inform classroom instruction.