ollie-afe-2020: Article: Attributes from Effective Formative Assessment (CCSSO) - 3 views
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Formative assessment is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning to improve students’ achievement of intended instructional outcomes
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tkofoot on 12 Apr 20Everything we do is to improve student achievement. This helps us going future instruction.
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maryhumke on 12 Apr 20WE hear data driven decisions so often but this is a such a clear definition of why we base instructional decisions on data.
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Formative assessment is not an adjunct to teaching but, rather, integrated into instruction and learning with teachers and students receiving frequent feedbac
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In this type of classroom culture, students will more likely feel they are collaborators with their teacher and peers in the learning process.
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This collaboration is important. Students need to feel like they have respect and "own" their learning. I teach Special Ed, so I always give students a way to own their instruction and opportunities to improve.
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I agree. Not all kids are risk takers so when they feel supported they are more likely open up with the others in the learning process
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This is the direction I really want to go in my classrooms. It is transitioning my students from passive to more active learners. The part that I have work on is building the class norms and modeling them properly in my class.
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A classroom culture where there is collaboration between teacher and students in the learning process would be so exciting. I think it would hold students more accountable when they are part of their own process.
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Because the formative assessment process helps students achieve intended learning outcomes based on explicit learning progressions, teachers must first identify and then communicate the instructional goal to students
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This is an important statement. Students need to know the instructional goal. I do think this is missed. It is a good reminder for me moving forward. I feel like I do this, but what does that look like?
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Agreed! However, I struggle to find that most students don't "care" about this goal unless you make it relevant to them right now. (And even with this some don't care.) I would love for students to buy in to what we are all doing in our classrooms and understand the bigger pictures, then they would understand the learning progressions.
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The communication of the end goal is something that I need to do a better job with. I think I will have better outcomes from my formative assessment when my students see there purpose rather than just me.
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My new curriculum is all about the I Can statements and reviewing it at the end, so this is very helpful. I agree with the comment above- Now to motivate the students to care!
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Learning progressions describe how concepts and skills build in a domain, and show the trajectory of learning along which students are expected to progress. From a learning progression teachers have the big picture of what students need to learn, as well as sufficient detail for planning instruction to meet short-term goals. They are able to connect formative assessment opportunities to the short-term goals to keep track of how well their students’ learning is moving forward.
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I have enjoyed our course work on this. It has made me really think the steps between objection and assessment.
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I agree with you. The Progression diagram that I have made 2 different times has really helped me understand how to break the learning down. Trying to make sure students are achieving at each step is so important to their success.
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It should help the student answer three basic questions: Where am I going? Where am I now? How can I close the gap?
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I will remember these questions Often feedback is just a general statement of good job. These questions will drive student with specific feedback.
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I really like the idea of posing those questions to the students and make them more engaged in their learning and the skill of really knowing where they are in the learning progression.
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I imagine the learning progressions posted on the wall and when conferring with students, posing the questions - where are you now? where are you going? how will you get there?
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I think posing the questions to students would be a great way to have them do some self-reflection. That would also help the teacher to understand the students' perception of where they are and be able to give appropriate feedback. For example, a teacher might think a student is doing something well because they have evidence of that, but it would help to know if the student felt they knew it well enough so that they could replicate it in the future.
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student- and peer-assessment should not be used in the formal grading process.
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Sharing learning goals and criteria for success with students, supporting students as they monitor and take responsibility for their own learning, helping students to provide constructive feedback to each other, and involving students in decisions about how to move learning forward are illustrations of students and teachers working together in the teaching and learning process.
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I want to increase this in my classroom so if you have ideas, please do share! :) I want students to feel comfortable with this process and care about the learning progressions we are moving through. I want there to be good peer feedback and not just students "jumping through the hoops" so that they themselves get better at the big ideas and collaboration pieces.
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I think this is very important. There are too many variables in peer statements and comments.
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You must also relate your explanation to one of the properties we have been discussing in class to indicate the reason the steps were incorrect.” Again, the students know the goal, where their response differed from the criteria, and how they can improve their explanations.
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Effective formative assessment involves collecting evidence about how student learning is progressing during the course of instruction so that necessary instructional adjustments can be made to close the gap between students’ current understanding and the desired goals.
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These are only effective when teachers/students use them to drive the instruction further. It is not enough to just say that we are doing formative assessments but then disregarding the data that they give us. Changes and adaptions must be made to successfully move all students forward with the material.
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I agree. I think this also goes with doing a pretest or pre assessment. What data are you trying to get and what are you actually going to do with that data to enhance your teaching and to adjust your teaching for your students.
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A second important part of the definition is its unequivocal requirement that the formative assessment process involve both teachers and students. The students must be actively involved in the systematic process intended to improve their learning.
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So important to build this process in our classrooms so that students take ownership of their learning and want to do better. (I would love tips on how to do this better in my own room if anyone has some!) :)
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Getting students to consistently take ownership of their learning has been one of the most difficult tasks of my career. Intrinsic motivation is key, but by definition, it has to come from within a student There are things a teacher can do, such as offer freedom and choice, but this can be very difficult for students that do not buy in.
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a process used by teachers and students
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It's important to emphasize that it is a process used both by teachers AND students. I think too often, students don't realize how much informaiton a formative assessment can also provide them and help them with goal-setting for future lessons.
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I think that most teachers use formative assessments throughout their lesson plans and teaching without even knowing that they are doing it!
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This is why I liked the learning progression activity. It put the use of formative assessments front and center when creating units. Something I need to do better with.
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I agree that teachers have been using the formative assessment process before it was given a name. I think they knew they were doing it and because it is good practice, gave it a name.
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These range from informal observations and conversations to purposefully planned instructionally embedded techniques designed to elicit evidence of student learning to inform and adjust instruction.
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It's always interesting to hear the groans from students if I announce that we are going to have a more formal formative assessment (such as a quick 2-3 question quiz) vs. the simpler formative assessments that I conduct daily in terms of having conversations with students/groups or thumbs up/thumbs down. There's this misconception with students (at least my own) in that if I announce we are having an assessment, it suddenly becomes more important than the daily check-ins.
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The process requires the teacher to share learning goals with students and provide opportunities for students to monitor their ongoing progress.
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In my building we've spent a few professional development sessions on crafting student-friendly learning targets that we regularly communicate to students and that students can communicate back to us. We are working on how we can better have students monitoring their own progress at reaching those learning goals. I think it's critical that the learning targets are student-friendly so that it becomes easier for them to monitor their own progress.
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The communication piece is key to pulling teachers and students together for the same purpose. I would love to continue on finding ways for students to understand the formative assessments and how they can help in the student's learning.
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Yes, getting students not to push back is key. I find that my students this year, shut down if I attach the word assessment to any thing. I think that they issue is, the educational system has trained students to think with a "for grade" mentality. Somehow we have to shift that focus to a "learning mentality". Is it possible to get parents to and students not to worry about grades and simply worry about the learning that can happen?
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In peer-assessment, students analyze each others’ work using guidelines or rubrics and provide descriptive feedback that supports continued improvement.
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I think the use of peer-assessment can be really effective in helping students think about their learning and make changes. It's helpful for them to hear from their peers, and not always receive feedback from just the teacher. I think this brings up a good point, though. Students have to be explicitly taught how to provide helpful feedback, without it, their comments and feedback are often superficial and won't really help the student make progress.
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I really like this as a formative assessment that I need to incorporate more into my units. What I like is the students are now being more involved in the learning process.
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Have you had any success doing this. At the middle school level we have started pairing the teams together and we present and give feedback across the two teams. However, it is still not what we want it to be. We made a sheet with look fors and sentence stems to help students. We've even stopped a class of 60 students and told them that we are listening for you to us...(a certain sentence stem), and that helps a little, but it still seems a bit fake. I can't tell if we aren't doing something right or if the idea of it is just so foreign to them. I know that as a student we never did peer feed back and the best feedback I got from a teacher was a, "Wow, your hard work is evident".
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I like the idea of peer-assessment, but think it would probably work best when the students do not know who is providing the feedback nor to whom they provided feedback. It would require discussion and practice, but allows students to do some analysis which should cause more critical thinking of the work they too are completing.
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process
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I think we still struggle as a system to view formative assessment as a process. Case in point, administrators in my previous buildings would ask teachers to bring their "formative assessments" to our PLC meetings. It became a tangible thing vs. observations, etc.
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I am glad that you brought this up. This whole process is supposed to be something that moves student learning forward and deeper and our profession to new heights. That definitely gets lost in translation when it becomes something forced. My administrators have done the same thing. The meaningful process becomes lost when teachers do it just because they are told to, or they are just going through the motions. I think that you are correct when you say it's so much more than a tangible thing, it has to be observational as well. We also have to get educators to see the value of it and using formative assessments to guide our practice.
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Specific, timely feedback should be based on the learning goal and criteria for success.
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"timely feedback" - students don't want formative feedback when they already took their summative assessment. Make the feedback relatable and clear. If you make the feedback irrelevant it is not meaning full to the student.
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I do like using the language in the rubric to specify what they did well as well as what needs to be built upon to hit the success criteria.
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I also liked that part. I have a hard time with the whole specific, timely feedback. I don't always know how to go about doing it for a 150 students. I think that being more clear on the rubric might really help. Rather than focus on content I could include wording needed that help develop the skills needed to get to or master the content. I still am unsure how to effectively answer the where going, where now, and closing the gap questions. I wonder if students can be given a self assessment with a carefully worded rubric and them I can review those and make changes as needed. What ideas or methods do the rest of you use to meet the needs of the last three questions in this sentence?
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YES! This cuts out all of the fluff and gets to the heart of what we want kids to learn! Creating better learning targets makes teaching much more purposeful!
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To support both self- and peer-assessment, the teacher must provide structure and support so students learn to be reflective of their own work and that of their peers, allowing them to provide meaningful and constructive feedback.
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I think this is a great way to incorporate the rubric that would be used to assess the student. Peer feedback is one that could go really well and really bad if the teacher doesn't set the guidelines of what it looks like. This is a teachable moment in it's self.
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I agree with this statement. If a student can successfully self evaluate according to criteria like a rubric then they can have success with peers. Start there.
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I have found that if I ask students to give each other a grade, it is basically useless, as they will just give each other an A. But if I ask them to comment and send back for revision, in actually work quite well. Qualitative over quantitative has been key for me.
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In other words, there is no such thing as “a formative test.” Instead, there are a number of formative assessment strategies that can be implemented during classroom instruction.
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Viewing formative assessment as a process rather than any one or a series of discrete assessments is critical in my mind for formative assessment to really do what it is meant to do and that is to inform instruction and improve student learning. Never too many reminders of this fact.
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I think the definition has changed a bit since 2006. I know my administrators include AFTER the instruction as formative assessment such as ticket outs and even quizzes. All still help guide teaching decisions but many occur after.
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We use formative assessments in the in-person classroom multiple times within the class period. I have done some formative assessments, realized all of the kids were well past proficient (thanks to great background knowledge), and I moved on. In that sense, there was no test needed.
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Using the evidence elicited from such tasks connected to the goals of the progression, a teacher could identify the “just right gap” – a growth point in learning that involves a step that is neither too large nor too small – and make adjustments to instruction accordingly.
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It is important to identify those "just right gaps" for individual students and for the class as a whole so that time isn't wasted on things they have already mastered nor do some or all of the students feel lost or overwhelmed. Learning progressions in conjunction with ongoing formative assessment help pinpoint where additional instruction or practice may be needed.
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This is one of the positive aspects of blended learning. I can figure out who has gaps and bring them in to work on the skills they need to improve.
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I hadn't thought about how an additional benefit of a well-written learning target is that it allows a teacher to readily know what the next step of learning is for students and let's them use that knowledge to help give feedback that is alerts the student to next steps in their learning, but that makes absolute sense!
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teachers must provide the criteria by which learning will be assessed so that students will know whether they are successfully progressing toward the goal. This information should be communicated using language readily understood by students, and may be accompanied by realistic examples of those that meet and do not meet the criteria.
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Providing students with user friendly criteria upon which they can self-assess their own progress is critical for optimal learning.
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I agree! Too many students aren't able to tell if they are "on track" because they think they have to get in the heads of their teachers. The assessment piece remains a mystery to them.
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Formative assessment is a process that directly engages both teachers and students.
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The teacher might first offer students a paraphrased version of that goal such as, “You will be able to judge the strengths and weaknesses of arguments in the editorials you find in our daily newspapers.” The teacher would discuss the criteria for evaluating arguments and then provide several examples of critiques of political essays. This will provide students with a reasonably clear idea of the analytic skills they are to develop and also provide them with the tools required to assess their own written analyses.
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With this kind of descriptive feedback and collaboration, the teacher clarifies the goal for the student, provides specific information about where the student is in relation to meeting the criteria, and offers enough substantive information to allow the student an opportunity to identify ways to move learning forward.
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Helping students think meta-cognitively about their own learning fosters the idea that learning is their responsibility and that they can take an active role in planning, monitoring, and evaluating their own progress.
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I think teachers and students need to hear and believe this concept more. Once teachers buy into allowing students more o fa role in their learning, students will take on more responsibility...in the ideal world.
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Absolutely! We need to re-structure the classroom environment so that students don't see it as hierarchical. The teacher should be a guide in the room, sitting among his/her students. This way, students may begin to develop more ownership of their learning.
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Helping students see that the only way they can truly learn is when they take ownership for their learning is the key. We will never be able to teach someone who does not want to learn.
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Students can use a rubric to provide feedback to a peer by articulating reasons why a piece of work is at one level and discussing how it could be improved to move it to the next level.
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inform instruction and learning during the teaching/learning process
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particular kind of assessment.
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My first year or two, I believed that it was a specific assessment. The confusion between formative and summative for a new teacher is hard to grasp if you haven't been explicitly taught.
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I worry that in our district's attempts at the PLC process that teachers have gotten the wrong impression that formative assessment has to be proven through a specific assessment in order to facilitate a data-driven discussion. I believe that data can tell us a great deal about where our students are and how to move them forward, but I don't like the idea of it replacing ongoing feedback about the process.
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This is an important point. Any, and potentially all assessments can and should be formative.
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Students build on this learning in later stages of the progression to develop an understanding that people represent and interpret the past in different ways
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An effective teacher understands that this must be built upon before students can learn new material.
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Looking back at my early days as an educator, I did not do a very good job at this. In hindsight, I really assumed that students knew how to do some things that they obviously did not know how to do. I still find that I have to get myself to slow down and break apart tasks for students. I wonder how many other teachers struggle with this, and may not even be aware of it!
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However, for students to be actively and successfully involved in their own learning, they must feel that they are bona fide partners in the learning process. This feeling is dependent on a classroom culture characterized by a sense of trust between and among students and their teachers; by norms of respect, transparency, and appreciation of differences; and by a non-threatening environment. Creating such a culture requires teachers to model these behaviors during interactions with students, to actively teach the classroom norms, and to build the students’ skills in constructive self- and peer-assessment.
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I think this is so very true. I fully think that we as a system we have to do a better job at promoting learners not students. Students do things for a grade. They follow the rules so they don't get into trouble. They don't follow the rules to get out of work or other outside issue. Learners however, they do the work to learn, even if it were not graded. They come to school to better themselves and they understand that they are there are doing the work for themselves, it's a passion of self improvement. The know the teacher is there to facilitate them and they understand that the person in charge of the learning in the classroom isn't the teacher, it's them, the learner. I hope, that through the formative assessment process, scientists seminars, and norms that I have developed, that I am beginning to foster more learners and less students. It is a journey that has forced me to become less of a teacher and more of learner myself.
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A teacher needs to have modeled good feedback with students and talked about what acceptable and unacceptable comments look like in order to have created a safe learning environment
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As an instructional coach, this is a step that I frequently saw teacher's skip when they asked students to to self- and peer-feedback. Teachers assumed students knew how to give high quality feedback then were frustrated with the responses with students gave, often coming to the conclusion that self- and peer-feedback were a waste of time because the feedback lacked quality.
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I find this the most important piece. If I don't model feedback, how are kids supposed to know what's going on? Without the modeling, this becomes an unimportant time-filler.
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Effective formative assessment involves collecting evidence about how student learning is progressing during the course of instruction so that necessary instructional adjustments can be made to close the gap between students’ current understanding and the desired goals.
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I would say that sometimes PLC work goes too far in this...there is too much data being thrown around, and less attention to actual teaching. Sometimes, the formative assessments are analyzed but the kids don't receive any feedback. If we want our students to be a partner in the learning, the feedback has to be provided to the student, not just for teacher use.
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