What is formative assessment?
On the journey of teaching and learning, formative assessment guides both the student and teacher along the path with directional learning checkpoints. As small, frequent learning measurements, formative assessments evaluate student understanding throughout the lesson and highlight areas of improvement during the learning process.
The goal of formative assessment is to monitor progress and provide ongoing feedback. In most definitions of formative assessment, educators point out that they are generally low-stakes and have a low point value or are not included in a student’s grade at all.
Summative vs. Formative Assessments
There’s a distinct difference between summative and formative assessments1 Unlike formative assessment, summative assessment is a final, high-stakes assessment. Summative assessments evaluate student knowledge at the end of a chapter, unit, or year. They are typically graded, scored, or ranked and require a thorough and time-consuming process. Examples of summative assessment include a chapter or unit test, final exam, capstone project, or similar task that evaluates learning at the end of instruction.
The goal of a summative assessment is to gauge a student’s knowledge acquisition. After employing multiple ways of teaching to address a topic, educators need to see what students have mastered. The data from summative assessments can provide an overall view of a student’s performance in class and be a solid indicator of how the student will succeed at the end of the course. If a student fails the summative assessment, the question becomes, “what could the teacher have done sooner to identify their struggles before the final test?”
The answer to that question lies in formative assessments, which are central to student growth in a data-driven classroom. Teachers can re-direct instruction based on feedback from their students throughout a lesson.
Formative assessments can be given multiple times throughout the lesson to measure student understanding of the material. They do not require the same level of planning or implementation as a summative assessment, so they are easier to insert into a lesson when the teacher needs to take a quick temperature check.
Formative assessments closely mirror the real world in which we live and work and help students and teachers develop a growth mindset. Think about life in general. How many times will you truly encounter a situation where you face a one-shot, perform-or-go-home scenario? From championship athletic competitions or make-or-break presentations at work, these moments do exist, but more common are practices, scrimmages, regular-season games, reports, and projects with daily feedback.
Formative Assessment Tools
A learning management system (LMS) makes it possible to provide real-time formative feedback to students via course announcements, class discussion, online “exit slips,” and formative quizzes. With seamless integration with analysis software, an LMS makes it possible to do these things and put the student in control of their goal-setting, learning, and improvement strategies more quickly and efficiently than ever before.
Formative Assessment Strategies
Entrance and exit tickets provide a great link to the previous day’s lesson and segue into the next day’s lesson, each providing a checkpoint for student understanding2 The entrance ticket asks students to offer their current level of knowledge on a topic or recall critical elements from the previous class lesson. Exit tickets are used at the end of a lesson to concisely recap the day’s material or allow students time to make meaningful connections to the material. Upon scanning the entrance and exit ticket results, teachers can immediately identify areas of the lesson that students may be struggling with and spend time during class recapping these items.
Additionally, the Association of American Educators discusses several formative assessment strategies, including:
- Journaling: A classic way for students to record and reflect upon their progress toward goals. Ideally, peers and teachers should provide feedback on journal entries when appropriate.
- Metacognition table: An exit-ticket style formative assessment in which students respond to various prompts on an index card, such as “What did we learn today?” and “What questions do I still have about this topic?”
- Four corners: Each corner of the classroom is assigned to represent a response. Students move to the corner that they believe represents the correct answer when prompted by the teacher.
- Thumbs voting: One of the most common discussion techniques, in which the teacher asks for a thumbs-up from students if they understand the material, a thumbs-down if they don’t, and a thumbs-sideways if they are unsure.
The NWEA has also compiled a list of formative assessment strategies, including the popsicle stick activity, think-pair-share discussions, Venn diagrams, and more.
Cooperative Engagement Structures for Collecting Formative Data
For in-person classes, cooperative engagement structures allow students the freedom to work with their peers while the instructor monitors their progress. Teachers can set up breakout rooms for virtual learners so students can work through problems together and spend a few minutes observing and answering questions in each room throughout the class period. This close monitoring can serve as a learning check to show where students are struggling with understanding material.
The “Rally Coach”3 strategy includes students working in pairs to explain their thought process, solve problems, and help their partners as needed, verbally. This engagement structure allows the teacher to move freely throughout the in-person classroom and monitor students as they work through the tasks. The breakout method discussed above is a suitable modification for virtual classrooms. Alternatively, you can have students try the Rally Coach strategy in the discussion section of your LMS, where you can review their written conversation after they’re done.
Another in-person cooperative engagement structure is “Quiz/Quiz/Trade.” In this structure, the educator comes up with pre-printed questions in any format on a card Students will find another student to “quiz“ with their question, concealing the correct answer on the back. If the student answers incorrectly, the question is noted in the corner with a tally.
After students have traded questions with several students, the educator will collect the cards and quickly see which cards contain frequently missed questions. These topics are now identified as priorities for re-teaching.
Formative Assessments Benefit Both Students and Teachers
Ultimately, gathering data on student performance benefits both students and educators in the learning process. It provides a chance to reflect on the material covered, how it was presented, and students’ prior knowledge. As teachers prepare for the 2021-2022 school year, it’s essential to have various formative assessment strategies on hand to accelerate learning gains. Formative assessment data can be the key to seeing substantial progress this upcoming school year and beyond.
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