Educational Leadership:Informative Assessment:The Best Value in Formative Assessment - 3 views
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Even though assessments will continue to be labeled formative or summative, how the results are used is what determines whether the assessment is formative or summative.
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but some, by design, are better suited to summative use and others to formative use.
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Although such assessments are sometimes intended for formative use—that is, to guide further instruction for groups or individual students—teachers' and administrators' lack of understanding of how to use the results can derail this intention
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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
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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.
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music instructors are said to do formative assessments every 5-10 seconds. I haven't figured out whether that's good or bad.
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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.
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One of the most important features of formative assessment is that teachers and students are both actively involved in the assessment process. Students are not just passive recipients of grades, but must set learning goals and reflect on their own learning, making adjustments in strategies when needed. My guess is that in most classrooms, especially at the high school level, this will be a radical departure from the norm.
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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.
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What is formative assessment, then? First, it's not a product.
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Assessment for learning can take many different forms in the classroom.
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I feel that modern language teachers do many assessments during each class. This year, we tracked all the kinds of assessments that we do. I have already ended up with a huge notebook full of the different types of assessment that is used in my classroom. My question is if we should have that many or should we concentrate on ones that give us the best results on depicting a student's progress. -
I always think back to what Doug Reeves says about the difference between formative and summative assessments. He says formative assessment is like exploratory surgery; summative assessment is like an autopsy. -
Great description Bridgette. I love this and will use it with my college students.
