Responsive Evaluation: Making Valid Judgments About Student Literacy

Responsive Evaluation describes the journey of a group of classroom teachers, administrators, and researchers as they addressed the issues of evaluation and assessment. They wanted to find a model that was congruent with the way literacy is taught, convincing parents and the general public that there were credible alternatives to traditional methods of evaluating learning.

Dr. Brian Cambourne started his career by teaching for fifteen years in a variety of small, mostly one-teacher schools. He has since become one of Australian's most eminent researchers of literacy and learning. He was a post-doctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; a Fulbright Scholar; Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Reading at the University of Illinois and Research Fellow at the Learning Centre at Tucson. Currently he is Associate Professor and head of the Language, Learning and Literacy Unit at the University of Wollongong. His major interest is in professional development for literacy education and he is committed to the idea of co-learning and co-researching with teachers.

Dr. Jan Turbill has been a classroom teacher and a consultant and is currently Senior Lecturer, Unit for Language, Learning and Literacy at the University of Wollongong. For many years she has been involved in professional development, both in Australia and in North America, and is interested in the role that language plays in learning, particularly in the learning of teachers.