Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know

About W. Popham

About our author James Pophamhas spent the bulk of his educational career as a teacher. His first teaching assignment for example was in a small eastern Oregon high school where he taught English and social studies while serving as yearbook advisor class sponsor and unpaid tennis coach. The recompense meshed well with the quality of his coaching. Most of Dr. Popham's teaching career took place at UCLA where for nearly 30 years he taught courses in instructional methods for prospective teachers as well as courses in evaluation and measurement for graduate students. At UCLA he won several distinguished teaching awards. In January 2000 he was recognized by UCLA Today as one of the university's top 20 professors of the twentieth century. (He notes that the twentieth century was a full-length century unlike the current abbreviated one.) In 1992 he took early retirement from UCLA upon learning that emeritus professors received free parking. Because at UCLA he was acutely aware of the perishability of professors who failed to publish he spent his non-teaching hours affixing words to paper. The result: over 30 books 200 journal articles 50 research reports and 175 papers presented before research societies. Although not noted in his official vita while at UCLA he also authored 1426 grocery lists. His most recent books areTransformative Assessment(2008);Instruction That Measures Up(2009);Transformative Assessment in Action(2011);Mastering Assessment(2011 Pearson);Unlearned Lessons (2009 Harvard Education Press);Everything School Leaders Need to Know About Assessment(2010); andEvaluating America's Teachers: Mission Possible?(2013 Corwin). He encourages purchase of these books because he regards their semi-annual royalties as psychologically reassuring. In 1968 Dr. Popham established IOX Assessment Associates an R&D group that formerly created statewide student achievement tests for a dozen states. He has personally passed all those tests largely because of his unlimited access to the tests' answer keys.