Formative Assessment

Responding to Your Students

Harry Grover Tuttle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781596670969
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317930105
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This "how-to" book on formative assessment is filled with practical suggestions for teachers who want to use formative assessment in their classrooms. With practical strategies, tools, and examples for teachers of all subjects and grade levels, this book shows you how to use formative assessment to promote successful student learning.

1

Formative Assessment: Student Response

Overview

♦ Setting the Stage

♦ Questions

♦ Formative Assessment Introduction

♦ Preassessment of Your Students

♦ Sharing the Learning Standards with Your Students

♦ Sharing the Quality of Learning with Your Students

♦ Summary

Setting the Stage

Mr. Davis, a social studies teacher at Roxboro Middle School, teaches a Civil War unit. He starts off with a lecture, has many textbook exercises for his students, sprinkles in some quizzes, and then at the end of the unit gives a final examination. Approximately 70% of his students pass the final. Meanwhile, Miss Potter, who also teaches the same social studies unit, starts off her unit with sharing the goals of the unit, explains why these goals are important to the students, gives a preassessment, shows her students samples of exemplary work to help them understand the quality she requires, does some lecturing, engages students in many in-depth activities, observes and gives feedback to each student frequently throughout the unit, has students regularly peer assess and self-assess their learning, and has a final project. Through using formative assessment, all of her students receive a proficient grade, and many receive an above-proficient grade.

Questions

♦ What is formative assessment?

♦ What are the major components of formative assessment?

♦ What are the similarities between formative assessment and standards-based education?

♦ How can you share learning goals with your students?

♦ How can you share the quality of the learning goals with your students?

Formative Assessment Introduction

Understand Formative Assessment and Summative Assessment Differences

Any time you assess students, you either assess in a summative or a formative way (Scriben, 1967). In a summative manner you tell students their grades or the final results; these summative assessments usually are at the end of a lesson, unit, quarter, or year. Often summative assessments are of the forced choice type such as multiple choice, and they are done during “testing” time. Conversely, in formative assessments, students do not receive a grade, but they do receive feedback that helps them to improve. You do formative assessments as part of the regular classroom learning; you embed formative assessment into classroom learning. Summative assessments often imply an “end” to the learning; formative assessments promote “along-the-way” assessment (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006).

Define Formative Assessment

Formative assessment refers to assessment that is specifically intended to generate feedback to improve and accelerate student learning (Sadler, 1998). You may have heard formative assessment referred to as “continuous assessment” (Erickson, 2007), “early warning assessment” (Johnson, 2005), “interactive formative assessment” (Cowie & Bell, 1999), or “dynamic assessment” (Shepard, 2000). Formative assessment occurs when you feed information back to the students in ways that enable the students to learn better, or when students can engage in a similar self-reflective process (National Center for Fair and Open Testing, 2007). Heritage (2007b) expands the concept by saying that the process involves obtaining evidence about student learning, providing feedback to students, and closing the gap between the learner’s current and desired state. Formative assessment is not a specific type of assessment, rather it is the manner in which the assessment is used (Afflerbach 2005). Popham (2008) emphasizes that formative assessment is a process. Figure 1.2 illustrates the aspects of formative assessment.

1. Formative Assessment Process

Incorporate Formative Assessments into the Bigger Assessment Picture

State tests, course finals, quarterly benchmarks, and unit tests are important because they summarize your students’ past learning; however, they do not help the students improve on a regular weekly basis as classroom formative assessments do. These summative assessments reveal what was learned, but they do not provide specific suggestions for the students to improve. When you use formative assessments you identify the present status of the students in terms of the learning standard, diagnose what to do to assist them, provide feedback, allow students to make the changes, and celebrate their learning successes. The following visual demonstrate the bigger picture of assessment.

Figure 1.2. Big Assessment Picture

Learn the Advantages of Formative Assessment

Why would you want to use formative assessment? When teachers use formative assessment, students can learn in six to seven months what will normally take a school year to learn (Leahy, Lyon, Thompson, & Wiliam, 2005). Furthermore, Ainsworth and Viegut (2006, p. 23) explain that when you use formative assessment, you are better able to: determine what standards students already know and to what degree; decide what changes in instruction to make so that all students succeed; create appropriate lessons, activities, and groupings; and inform students about their progress to help them set goals. Also, formative feedback is the most powerful single moderator in the enhancement of achievement (Hattie, 1998). In addition, the research of Black and Wiliam (1998) emphasize that this approach works extremely well with at-risk students.

Connect Formative Assessment Process and the Standards

Formative assessment focuses on helping the teacher understand “how” students can improve in their learning so that they can be proficient. Standards-based education has been focused on “what” the students learn; standards refer to the specific learning designated by national educational organizations, state departments of education, or local school districts. Once you help students to know what they are to learn, they can focus on how to learn it well. Standards-based education and a formative assessment approach share many common characteristics. When standards-based education and a formative assessment approach are combined, teachers like you have a powerful learning tool.

Identify Formative Assessment Strategies

The purpose of formative assessment, helping students improve in their learning, is a simple concept, yet this simple concept encompasses many distinct strategies. Many educators (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Sadler, 1998b; Stiggins, 2007; Heritage, 2007a) have identified what constitutes formative assessment.

♦ Preassessing students

♦ Sharing learning goals with students

♦ Sharing or co-creating of learning criteria with students

♦ Employing quality classroom discourse and questioning

♦ Using rich and challenging tasks that elicit students’ responses

♦ Identifying the gap between where the students are now and the desired standard goal

♦ Providing feedback that helps students identify how to improve

♦ Using self-assessment and peer assessment

♦ Providing students with opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance

♦ Celebrating learning progressions

This formative assessment listing looks very similar to a standards-based learning chart designed by O’Shea (2006, pp. 98–100) as shown in Figure 1.3 where the standard component is on the left and the formative assessment is on the right.

Figure 1.3. Standards-Based Learning

Components*	In a formative assessment approach and a standards-based lesson
Edits the chosen standard to select a key goal for the unit. Paraphrases it in the student’s language.	♦ Tells the students the standard in their language.
	♦ Has posted the standard and refers to it throughout the unit.
Plans for assessments on the standard before, during, and after the unit.	♦ Preassesses students to determine their present status in the standard.
	♦ Informs students of the high level of expectation in the standard, and shows them exemplars.
	♦ Informs students of the format of assessments.
	♦ Frequently gives formative standards-based assessments and analyzes the results.
	♦ Gives a post-assessment that represents the highest thinking level of the standard.
Develops performance tasks.	♦ Tells students how in-class tasks, homework, and projects advance them in the standard.
	♦ Assigns performance tasks that clearly demonstrate the standard.
	♦ Observes the results of each performance task to adjust instruction.
Scaffolds the performance tasks.	♦ Scaffolds through using various sequential performance tasks to help all students climb the cognitive ladder in the standard.
Incorporates the standard’s key vocabulary throughout the unit.	♦ Includes key vocabulary in teaching and requires it in students’ oral, visual, and written responses.

* From Standards to Success (pp. 98–100), by M. R. O’Shea, 2006, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

In addition, Reif’s (2004) explanation of standards-based learning mirrors a description of formative assessment. Curriculum and instruction are not based on a textbook but on the standards that all students are to meet through differentiated instruction. Also, assessments are not used to determine a grade but to inform students of expectations and achievements. In the same manner, student feedback is much more than just a letter grade; student feedback focuses on progress toward meeting the standards. Students do more than focus on the current activity; they describe where they are in the learning progress and know what they can do to achieve the learning goals. Teachers in teams collaboratively assess students’ work and decide how to improve the students’ performance

Preassessment of Your Students

Once you have identified the standard and its highest quality level, create a preassessment (pretest, diagnostic tests, or baseline data test). The preassessment allows you to monitor and adjust instruction. Do you start your class within the first few weeks of the year with a diagnostic test of where the students are in terms of the skills and knowledge that they need for your class so you can create differentiated instruction for the learning success of all students (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006)? Stronge’s (2002) research reveals that teachers in schools with high achievement rates use preassessment to support targeted teaching. Figure 1.4 repres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Formative Assessment: Student Response
• 2 Formative Assessment: Monitoring
• 3 Formative Assessment: Diagnosis
• 4 Formative Assessment: Feedback for Moving Forward in Student Learning
• 5 Formative Assessment: Students’ Improvement Based on Feedback
• 6 Formative Assessment: Reporting, Grading, and Celebrating Students’ Standards-Based Growth
• References