Book excerpt: Designed to work with any curriculum, Cognition-Based Assessment and Teaching will enable you to better understand and respond to your students' learning needs and help you choose instructional activities that are best for them. Michael Battista offers a learning-progressions model for maximizing each student's progress&— helping students who are behind catch up, preventing future failures from occurring, and helping students who are ready move quickly ahead. Cognition-Based Assessment and Teaching will help you will all three tiers in RTI. Battista's approach emphasizes three key components that support students' mathematical sense making and proficiency: determining students' levels of sophistication in reasoning; assessing and monitoring the development of students' understanding of core ideas; and, differentiating instruction to meet individual students' learning needs. Using a research-based framework that describes the development of students' thinking and learning in terms of levels of sophistication, a “cognitive terrain” that includes ascents and plateaus, Battista shows how teachers can build on their students' reasoning with instruction that keeps them moving ever upwards.--Publisher.