however, teachers must plan and allow time for students to learn the knowledge and skills they missed on the summative assessment and to retake the assessment

When we try to teacher-proof the assessment process by providing a steady diet of ready-made external tests, we lose these advantages. Such tests cannot substitute for the day-to-day level of formative assessment that only assessment-literate teachers are able to conduct.

Where am I going? Give students a list of the learning targets they are responsible for mastering, written in student-friendly language. Show students anonymous strong and weak examples of the kind of product or performance they are expected to create and have them use a scoring guide to determine which one is better and why. Where am I now? Administer a nongraded quiz part-way through the learning, to help both teacher and students understand who needs to work on what. Highlight phrases on a scoring guide reflecting specific strengths and areas for improvement and staple it to student work. Have students identify their own strengths and areas for improvement using a scoring guide. Have students keep a list of learning targets for the course and periodically check off the ones they have mastered. How can I close the gap? Give students feedback and have them use it to set goals. Have students graph or describe their progress on specific learning targets. Ask students to comment on their progress: What changes have they noticed? What is easy that used to be hard? What insights into themselves as learners have they discovered? When students use feedback from the teacher to learn how to self-assess and set goals, they increase ownership of their own success. In this type of assessment environment, teachers and students collaborate in an ongoing process using assessment information to improve rather than judge learning. It all hinges on the assessment's ability to provide timely, understandable, and descriptive feedback to teachers and students.

When teachers assess student learning for purely formative purposes, there is no final mark on the paper and no summative grade in the grade book.

A student "class secretary" maintains a "What Did I Miss?" folder

Each teacher has a system of procedures for setting up small groups

Students are informed of and discuss the specific purpose/s before viewing a vide

Differences can best be accomplished by engaging in a process which has teachers using student and instructional assessment data to make sound instructional decisions to meet the needs of individual students.

In Student-centered Classrooms, students construct their own knowledge based on experiential, holistic, authentic, and challenging experiences.

while these 5 characteristics are essential to a successful school, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive of each other.