Assessment for Learning Project - Main Page

The Assessment for Learning Project (ALP) is a multi-year grant program and field-building initiative designed to fundamentally rethink the roles that assessment can and should play to advance student learning and improve K-12 education in the United States. If assessment is to become a lever for improving individual students’ opportunities and capacities to learn, then assessment must also become a lever for achieving more equitable education outcomes because it is not possible to achieve excellence without equity.

This research is made possible with funding from the Center for Innovation in Education at the University of Kentucky.

Led by the Center for Innovation in Education (CIE) at the University of Kentucky in partnership with Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) at EDUCAUSE, the ALP initiative aims to develop the field’s professional capacity to design and assess learning experiences in ways that simultaneously promote meaningful and equitable student learning.

ALP borrows its definition of equity from the National Equity Project: Educational equity means that each child receives what he or she needs to develop to his or her full academic and social potential. Working towards equity involves:

• Ensuring equally high outcomes for all participants in our educational system; removing the predictability of success or failures that currently correlates with any social or cultural factor.
• Interrupting inequitable practices, examining biases, and creating inclusive multicultural school environments for adults and children.
• Discovering and cultivating the unique gifts, talents, and interests that every human possesses.

This definition of equity points out that children need different supports or experiences to achieve their full potential.

To facilitate the initiatives aims of professional capacity development, ALP will deliver a series of five “field-facing memos”. The series will examine he various ways in which Assessment for Learning Project grantees are using, adapting and creating assessment practices oriented o learning.

Field Facing Memo #1: This memo, which is the first in the series, explores some of the assessment for learning practices that the initiative is supporting at Del Lago Academy of Applied Sciences, a small public high school in Escondido, California that educates a diverse group of scholars to develop industry-specific skills and expand their social networks and access to opportunities.