Formative Assessments: What, Why, and How
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Formative Assessments: What, Why, and How Learn what formative assessments are and why you should be doing them. Get tips for creating your own. Understand how to use them properly to measure students’ performance against learning outcomes, document students’ growth, and improve your teaching. Use the Impromptu Formative Assessments and the collection of 95 Formative Assessment Options to get started! Feedback as a Means of Formative Assessment Many people view assessment as a one-time event that occurs at the culmination FORMATIVE of a learning experience. However, it is better to conceptualize assessment as an ASSESSMENT ongoing process that guides the learning and teaching relationship so that all players involved gain valuable information about themselves and the knowledge they hold. Online extras at Types of Assessment kdp.org/publications/nta There are two main types of assessment: summative and formative. Summative assessment occurs after instruction in the form of a multiple choice test or final exam that indicates the level of knowledge that the student has attained (Woolfolk, 2013). Formative assessment, on the other hand, occurs both before and during instruction. The purpose is to guide the teacher in planning and preparing the lesson and improving student learning. It is not the assessments themselves that are formative or summative, but how they are used. Formative assessment can include multiple choice exams, but instead of giving them at the end By Marisa T. Cohen of the unit, they are used before or during the unit to gather information about what the student 4 • KDP New Teacher Advocate • Winter 2014 www.kdp.org Help for employing formative assessment: already knows. They are then used by the teacher to further mold lesson planning and to drive the West Virginia Department of Education learning process forward. List of formative assessment types with links and examples bit.ly/WVaDOE6 Assessment as a Garden Shirley Clark (2001) used a beautiful anal- Public Schools of North Carolina ogy of the school as a garden and the students Vignettes and podcasts of formative assessment in practice as the plants. Summative assessment would bit.ly/NCassess simply involve measuring your plants. While it is certainly interesting to compare and analyze Formative Assessment Strategies the measurements, it may not affect the future Easy ideas to use for formative assessment growth of these plants. Formative assessment bit.ly/FAStrat deals with the process of taking care of these plants, by considering how to feed and water them so that you are tending to their needs, promoting their growth, and creating a beauti- ful garden. Formative assessment can tell you ing formative assessment in an effective and how students are benefitting from instruction beneficial way is to use students’ feedback as it is taking place, and in turn help you adjust to alter your own teaching. This requires a the lessons accordingly. certain amount of flexibility, because the teacher must be willing to change her ap- Components of Formative Assessment proach based on what the students already For formative assessment to be beneficial, it know. In younger grades, many teachers use is imperative to include the class in the learning graphic organizers such as a K-W-L chart to process by providing them with a great deal of assess students’ preexisting knowledge. This feedback. You also must spend time reflecting on involves filling in what the students already what you are learning about your own teaching Know and what they Want to know prior to from the students’ feedback to you. the lesson. The teacher then reevaluates his or her approach to the unit before proceed- 1. Provide detailed feedback to guide ing to helping them Learn. Teachers also student learning. The more detailed the may consider using a pretest. This gives the feedback you provide, the more effective it teacher a sense of what the students already will be. Assigning a number or letter grade know and provides them with a sense of any is not useful because it does not communi- misconceptions the students hold regarding cate to the students what they know or the the information to be taught. areas in which they can improve. Rather, providing them with clearcut comments in The term assessment is used often in educa- the margins of the assignment will enable tion and usually has a negative connotation. It is them to edit their work and learn something important to learn effective ways to use assess- about their skills during the process. Feed- ment in the classroom and to understand how back also should provide students with some to employ formative assessment to guide your Dr. Cohen is an Assistant sense of understanding about how they are teaching. Also, it is imperative to stress to students Professor of Psychology at progressing toward the goal and what is still that assessment should not be considered a pun- St. Francis College in Brook- needed to reach it. You can even incorpo- ishment, but rather a way to evaluate what they lyn, New York. She teaches educational psychology, rate feedback in multiple choice exams by have mastered, with the hope of better tailoring general psychology, and having an open discussion of why certain learning to their unique needs. experimental courses. Her answers are better than others. This creates a interests include examining dialogue between the teachers and students References methods to teach students that can be used to clarify any misunder- Clarke, S. (2001). Unlocking formative assessment: content-specific terminology standings. Practical strategies for enhancing pupils’ learning in science and determining in the primary classroom. London, UK: Hodder & the ability of students to Stoughton. assess their own knowledge, 2. Use students’ feedback to learn about Woolfolk, A. E. (2013). Educational psychology (12th self-regulate, and adequate- your teaching. Another component of us- ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. ly prepare for exams. KDP New Teacher Advocate • Winter 2014 • 5 10 Tips for Creating Formative Assessments By Bill Ferriter on Center for Teaching Quality Blog (http://bit.ly/10Tips4FormAss) Here are ten tips taken from Common Formative Assessment: A Toolkit for PLCs at Work by Kim Bailey and Chris Jakicic that can strengthen your assessment practices. 1. Remember that getting information quickly and easily is essential. Assessment data is only valuable if you are actually willing and able to collect it and you can act on it in a timely manner. That simple truth should fundamentally change the way that you think about assessments. 2. Write your assessments and scoring rubrics together even if that means you initially deliver fewer common assessments. Collaborative conversations about what to assess, how to assess and what mastery looks like in action are just as valuable as student data sets. 3. Assess ONLY the learning outcomes that you identified as essential. Assessing nonessential standards just makes it more difficult to get—and to take action on—information quickly and easily. 4. Ask at least 3 questions for each learning outcomes that you are trying to test. That allows students to muff a question and still demonstrate mastery. Just as importantly, that means a poorly written question won't ruin your data set. 5. Test mastery of no more than 3 or 4 learning targets per assessment. Doing so makes remediation after an assessment doable. Can you imagine trying to intervene when an assessment shows students who have struggled to master more than 4 learning outcomes? 6. Clearly tie every single question to an essential learning outcome. Doing so makes tracking mastery by student and standard possible. Your data sets have more meaning when you can spot patterns in mastery of the outcome—not the question. 7. Choose assessment types that are appropriate for the content or skills that you are trying to measure. Using performance assessments to measure the mastery of basic facts is overkill. Similarly, using a slew of multiple choice questions to measure the mastery of complex thinking skills is probably going to come up short. 8. When writing multiple choice questions, use wrong answer choices to highlight common misconceptions. The patterns found in the WRONG answers of well-written tests can tell you just as much as the patterns found in the RIGHT answers. Fill your test with careless or comical distractors and you are missing out on an opportunity to learn more about your students. 9. When writing constructed response questions, provide students with enough context to be able to answer the question. Context plays a vital role in constructing a meaningful response to any question. Need proof? A teenage daughter asks her parent, "Can I go to the mall with some friends tonight?" Will the parent ask a few questions before saying yes? 10. Make sure that higher level questions ask students to apply knowledge and/or skills in new situations. A higher level question that asks students to apply knowledge in the same way as they have practiced before becomes a lower level question. WWW.KDP.ORG Assessment Practices Kappa Delta Pi Record, 49: 21–25, 2013 Copyright © Kappa Delta Pi ISSN: 0022-8958 print/2163-1611 online DOI 10.1080/00228958.2013.759826 SHIFTING OUR FOCUS by Dennis S. Rosemartin Understanding the differences among traditional, alternative, and authentic assessment practices can help shift our focus from assessment of learning to assessment for learning. Thirty years ago in a report about ability (Airasian, 1987; Hamilton & Koretz, 2002; Sloane testing, the National Research Council (NRC) & Kelly, 2003). concluded that although these forms of tests There is a need to shift toward assessment can be useful, “they are limited instruments and for learning practices. To support this argument, do not tell everything of importance about any I focus on four areas.