Group items tagged

"What is qualitative formative assessment? Some call it anecdotal or informal assessment. However, such designations imply passivity -- as if certain things were captured accidentally. I believe the word "formative" should always be included with the word assessment because all feedback mechanisms should help shape and improve the person (or situation) being assessed. Wedging the word "qualitative" into my terminology differentiates it from the analytic or survey-based measures that some associate with the term formative assessment."

"As a student, I would study for a test (most likely the day before or, I confess, even the period before), take the assessment, and then, much like a person who is done with a document on their desktop, my brain would simply "Empty Trash." To avoid this same scenario happening to my own students, I use assessments formatively. That is, I have designed a series of activities that routinely follow each test that help guide my students to learn from the results of their formal assessments."

"As educators, we give feedback to students on their work all the time: in the moment, daily, weekly, and at the end of a unit or year. And research about formative assessment tells us that feedback is a foundational practice that makes a difference in student learning. But how can we make sure our guidance truly encourages our students' learning and growth at each interval? The literature includes some practical ideas to help us get there. It tells us that there is a continuum of feedback, which starts at one end with a focus on what's right or wrong. At the other end of the continuum, the type and amount of information provided turns the feedback into instruction. Let's take a look at three different feedback models derived from the literature and the insights we can take away from each one."

"BIE has created free materials - "FreeBIEs" - such as planning forms, student handouts, rubrics, and articles for educators to download and use to design, assess, and manage projects."

"The practice also makes student learning visible and provides a valuable formative assessment tool. If a student sketches an interesting side note in the lesson, but misses the big themes, that will show up in her drawing. And when students share their drawings with one another, they have the chance to fill in the gaps in their knowledge, and drawings, while discussing the key ideas. Going over the drawings also solidifies the information for students."

Having devices in your classroom for students to use, whether you have carts of computers, iPads, or Chromebooks; a 1:1 program; or a BYOD initiative, can be exciting and overwhelming at the same time. Using these devices to provide content support and differentiation for each student is not hard to do. You have long been supplying material for your students at all levels to both remediate and expand their knowledge base. But what about designing formative and summative assessments that use technology and target higher-order thinking skills? Teachers should ask themselves this question, as well as how to develop tasks that transform what goes on in the classroom.

"If you want to move learners forward, they've got to know where they're starting. It's a simple truth but not one we tend to follow when it comes to professional learning for teachers. The ways in which we assess these learning experiences for educators often fall short of the realities of their contexts. Take, for example, the common practice of ending a session with evaluation forms largely devoted to measuring teachers' level of happiness with a token question intended to gauge the likelihood of someone taking an idea from the workshop and using it next week. These vanity metrics for the professional learning providers give little indication of the impact of their work and at best communicate a very surface set of goals we're striving to achieve as a group learning together. Why are we even attempting to measure impact before we give educators an opportunity to implement what they've learned? "