ATLAS Assessment Pathways™
Nurturing Student Thinking,
Understanding & Development

The evidence of students’ success lies in their work.

ATLAS Learning Communities offers two Assessment Pathways programs, Looking at Student Work and ATLAS Portfolios and Exhibitions. Both provide new insights into the way students think and develop understanding. In addition, they help teachers to more effectively assess what their students need to know and understand.

ATLAS Assessment Pathways™ Programs

Looking at Student Work

This curriculum provides teachers with new insights into the way their students think and develop understanding. Here, the focus is not on grading work for right or wrong answers, but on determining how and why students arrive at these answers. The program is
designed to:

• Align instruction to standards.
• Help teachers reflect on student learning.
• Foster accountability by determining the effectiveness of a curriculum and related instruction.
• Provide teachers with new insights into the thinking of their students, and the strengths and weaknesses of classroom assignments.
• Help teachers find new ways to take students to the next level of understanding.

A variety of protocols are modeled to illustrate the multiple purposes and outcomes on which a faculty or district might choose to focus as part of a collaborative process. Looking at Student Work is also a viable strategy for groups of principals and district leaders.

ATLAS Portfolios and Exhibitions.

Standardized tests are necessary for evaluating student skills and experience – necessary, but not sufficient. To measure the true breadth and depth of what a student understands and can do, ATLAS has created Portfolios and Exhibitions.

Portfolios. These are collections of artifacts that reveal student learning and thinking.

Exhibitions. These are culminating projects with a performance component that integrates more than one discipline, and provides students, teachers and parents with opportunities for analysis, inquiry and reflection on the depth of student understanding. ATLAS helps principals and teachers place standards along a continuum against which evidence of students' understanding can be collected over time in the form of a portfolio or culminating exhibition. Portfolios and exhibitions are both authentic measures of a student's performance, and can be used as internal and external critiques of student progress.