20 Formative Assessment Strategies that Work

A Guide Across Content and Grade Levels

Kate Wolfe Maxlow, Karen L. Sanzo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138046757
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351694575
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book provides teachers and school leaders with practical, effective, and proven assessment strategies that are immediately implementable in classrooms. You'll learn about 20 high-impact formative assessment strategies, with details on how they can be applied to a variety of content areas and grade levels, including mathematics, science, language arts, social studies, and various electives. In this accessible book, these experienced authors demonstrate the how and why, along with a framework for folding these new ideas into job-embedded professional development. 20 Formative Assessment Strategies that Work provides the full toolkit for implementing, managing, and modifying these assessment strategies in your school and classrooms today.

Arts: Formative Assessment Strategies Integrating the Arts into Formative Assessments

Have you ever said or heard any of the following from your colleagues?

• “We don’t sing in my classroom. I can’t sing and no one wants to hear that!”
• “I’m not an artist, so why would I do art in my classroom?”
• “I’m teaching Math (or Science or Library), not Fine Arts. Why would I have my kids sing or draw?”
• “All that arts integration stuff sounds great, but we don’t have time for that with our packed curriculum.”

If you have said or heard either of the first two, you are not alone. Studies have found that teachers are often reluctant to use the arts in their classrooms if they feel that their own artistic abilities are not up to par (Garvis & Pendergast, 2010; Oreck, 2004). We have great news, though: this chapter will show you how to easily integrate arts-related formative assessment tasks that require little to no training or natural artistic talent on your part! Not only can arts integration have a positive impact on your students’ learning and achievement, it might even help you reach students who struggle to learn through what many consider more “traditional” methods.

Why Music Integration Works

There exists a common myth that in order to increase anyone’s IQ, all a person has to do is listen to more Mozart. This idea came from a 1993 paper published in the journal Nature, in which the researchers found that having participants listen to a Mozart sonata improved their scores on spatial reasoning tests; unfortunately, subsequent studies have not yielded the same results (Johnson, 2013).

It turns out, however, that music can have a large impact on other areas that impact student success in the classroom. There is more and more evidence, for instance, supporting the link between exposure to music and language development (Asaridou & McQueen, 2013, McMullen & Saffran, 2004; Patel, 2003). Preschool students who are able to match a drumbeat are more likely to have stronger prereading skills; as Krause and Anderson (2015) point out, the “accurate temporal processing” that can be heightened by exposure to music is also part of foundational skills for reading.

Perhaps one of the greatest impacts of music on student achievement concerns the area of memory. If you have ever had a song “stuck in your head,” then you already know the powerful effect music can have on memory. In research settings, music has been shown repeatedly to help participants memorize multiplication tables, phone numbers, random numbers, and much more (Silverman, 2010). Especially when learning unfamiliar material, music can act as a “structural prompt”: we connect information with a particular rhythm and pitch that occur in a particular order (also known as a melody), so that we can recall information in a particular order based on our memorization of the melody itself (Silverman, 2010). In this way, music can be a powerful mnemonic device.

Why Visual Arts Integration Works

Have you ever caught yourself reading every word on a page but realizing you did not pay attention to a single word that you read? Or maybe you have taught a student who was a perfect “word-caller,” who could easily pronounce each word on the page, but could not understand anything happening in the text? In these cases, the brain “reads” the words but fails to process or make meaning of what is being said, and this is a frequent barrier to comprehension.

Enter the Visual Arts as a potentially powerful solution. One of the common reasons people struggle with reading is their inability to visualize what is happening in a particular passage of text, leading to decreased comprehension. Purposefully building in tasks that require students to stop, visualize, and create a piece of art that represents their visualization has been shown to increase comprehension (Wilhelm, 1995), as well as being an engaging technique for students.

Why Drama Integration Works

There are three parts of the brain involved in making and retrieving memories: the amygdala, which processes emotions tied to the memory; the hippocampus, which determines where and how the memory will be stored; and the frontal cortex, which processes the individual memory as part of a whole narrative or framework (Armstrong, 2008). Infusing tasks that use dramatic acting into our lessons is one very strong method for activating all these sections of the brain.

For instance, when students perform, they automatically associate the academic information with the emotions they portray (not to mention the emotions that students themselves feel while doing the acting). The hippocampus is often engaged through repetition or reinforcement of the material; having students act out even a short scene multiple times engages this area of the brain. Lastly, having students put content information into the context of a short scene helps them use their frontal cortex to develop the narrative or framework.

Tips for Using Arts Tasks for Formative Assessment

• Because the arts can have such a powerful impact on student memory, the teacher should check in with students frequently while they create a work, and provide immediate feedback for any misconceptions to avoid students retaining incorrect information.
• Students who are not used to these types of tasks, especially older students, may be reluctant to engage in them at first, or worry the tasks are not “serious” academic pursuits. In this case, it may be helpful for the teacher to share some of the research regarding why and how these tasks can impact learning and memory retention with students.
• Teachers should strongly consider how much time they want to allot to a particular Arts task, and stick to it as much as possible; given the engaging nature of these activities, it can be easy to let an entire class period slip away in creating a perfect drawing or song. The teacher should help students remain focused on the academic objectives for the task by explaining that these particular tasks are meant to be tools to engage students and see what they know.

Postcard Summaries

Description

This activity allows students to create “postcards” of their learning. This is a fun, creative opportunity for students to draw a picture of their learning on one side of a “postcard” and provide a summary to a person (their postcard message) on the other side. Teachers are able to formatively assess students both through pictorial representation and a brief summary of learning.

Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Preface
• eResources
• Introduction: Formatively Assessing Learning
• Part I: Arts: Formative Assessment Strategies
• Part II: Collaborative: Formative Assessment Strategies
• PART III: Movement: Formative Assessment Strategies
• PART IV: Select Response: Formative Assessment Strategies
• PART V: Supply Response: Formative Assessment Strategies
• References