169 Reading in a Participatory Culture, edited by Henry Jenkins, Wyn Kelley, Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, and Erin Reilly. Copyright © 2013 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights re- served. Prior to photocopying items for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Customer Service, 222 Rosewood Dr., Danvers, MA 01923, USA, tel. (978) 750-8400, www.copyright.com. CHAPTER 15 Participatory Assessment in a Climate of Accountability Daniel Hickey, Michelle Honeyford, and Jenna McWilliams Test-based accountability is perhaps the biggest obstacle for teachers who want to use tools like the Teachers’ Strategy Guide (TSG). A decade of No Child Leſt Behind has driven many schools from such innovations. Instead, more students face weeks of dreary preparation for tests based on long lists of isolated concepts and basic skills, getting ready for so-called interim as- sessments. As argued forcefully elsewhere in this volume, basic reading and writing skills and broad-domain knowledge are crucial for success in the digital networks that are becoming central to youth’s economic, social, and civic lives. Unfortunately, continuing efforts to raise achievement test scores directly don’t foster these skills and knowledge in ways that are use- ful in networked contexts. Meanwhile, policy makers and administrators insist that all education- al innovations be proved to affect achievement scores in strict experimen- tal studies. For reasons that can be surprisingly complicated, it is difficult to obtain such evidence of success for most innovations in typical schools. Participatory innovations like the TSG work by transforming the culture of entire classrooms, communities, and schools. While these transformations can and do leave behind broadly useful individual knowledge of academic topics, they do so somewhat indirectly—a problem for traditional models of testing and evaluation. Fortunately, new ideas about assessment, testing, and accountability from the learning sciences and elsewhere offer new responses to these challenges. is chapter describes how we tapped some of these ideas