Formative Assessment

What is a formative assessment?

Many educational experts have provided definitions but, in summary, using the perspective that “formative assessment can inform teacher and student where the student is now so both can know what comes next in the learning” (Stiggins 2015) is the most instructive.

Or, as many explain, formative assessments are for learning and summative assessments are of learning. (Stiggins, Arter, J. Chappuis, and S. Chappuis, 2006, Caaspp 2015)

Why use formative assessments?

• To create useful formative assessments, we need to use clear learning targets. This step allows teachers and students to “ know where they are headed from the very beginning of the learning. Just start instruction with student-friendly versions of the target and watch what happens.” ( Richard J. Stiggins, 2015)
• A formative activity gives us a quick understanding what we still need to teach, reteach, or review.
• “For teachers, formative-assessment tools are far more important than summative tests because they offer real-time insight into students' understanding.  (Marianne Perie, 2015)  
• An in class formative assessment can lighten the homework practice time but still hold our students' accountable for assessing their content and skill acquisition.
• Specific feedback to students to help them understand and assess their own learning about the specific tasks and expectations needed for mastery. This process is crucial practice for learning how to learn and the growth mindset we want to provide our students.
• Some formative activities can be crafted to provide assessment practice to further address our students’ different levels of previous and outside of our class experiences.

How to begin to introduce formative assessments?

1. Create a safe classroom that honors the learning process.
2. Clarify the learning targets, and equally more powerful, clarify the learning progression.
3. Choose a format that serves your calendar and classroom constraints. ( see examples below)
4. Review your format to be sure you are getting accurate information from language learners.
5. Review edtech options for easy and engaging tech formats. Example: Socrative

Sample formative activities:

·    Role play: Write a Postcard from one person, character, property, formula  to another

·    Short summary: Write a summary for 5 min only.; later allow 2 more minutes.

·    Illustratration: Create a graphic depiction of the new concepts. Draw a storyboard, multiple axis timeline, or progression of learning, events, order of operations, process, rules.

·    Anonymous Assessment: Hand in, pass out, share: Write answers to one or a list of questions, students do not include their name on the paper, turn it in, hand work out to other students, score, poll results. Students can take notes on the response they are scoring and keep it for reference.

·    Diagram/Compare and contrast: Venn diagram 2 to 3 new concepts.

·    Check off: Provide a list of expectations or learning targets and students, using symbols, indicate what they have accomplished (√),  what they are sure they can do (+), what they currently have questions about (?).

·        Metacognition: Respond in a doc, form, exit card, journal write, summary to notes to the metacognitive “w”s : What did we do? Why did we do it? What did I learn? What can I apply? What are my questions?

·    Signal: Red (stop:I need more info) yellow (slow down), green (got it) cards or use all white cards with colored circles on one side so that only the teacher sees the indicator.

·    or: Thumbs up, to the side, or  down, again in front of the student’s chest to keep the response private.

·    Collaborative Conversation: Ask your elbow partner a question about what was just covered, listen to the response, reverse the roles, record and submit this work. This conversation can be conducted verbally or silently, all in written form, or as individual or a shared document.

·    Quick write for journal writes, exit cards, or pre collaborative conversations:

What are you square with?

What is rolling around in your head?

What are 3 key points to remember/act on?

            

or:

3 things I learned, 2 things I will apply/remember, 1 question I have.

More Resources:

Ask to see your course team colleagues' for samples they have used, Steve Kahl offers a list in his new teacher training,  David Wees provides a list of formative assessments, the CAASPP digital library focuses on this strategy, and Marzano’s explains both the research and theory that supports and clarifies Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading in his 2010 text.

Please add a comment with your favorites and feel free to contact Joy to help find or create some for your units.

Lasting learning: class and homework options

A teacher, a neurosurgeon, and a football coach or how about a actor, pianist, and pilot … the start of a good joke or some useful, well rounded research.

How about two cognitive scientists and a writer?

Peter Brown, Mark McDaniel, and Henry Roediger in Make it Stick, the Science of Successful Learning (2014) describe some of the latest research about learning and memory. Most of this information is not new to us at MVLAUHSD but it can inform our discussions about teaching and learning and could help us as we focus on best practices for both classwork and  homework.

A few ideas from their research to consider, including their learning from that teacher, neurosurgeon, coach, pilot, pianist, and actor:

Reflections:  In Make It Stick, the authors describe how successful professionals who are lifelong learners all require reflection of themselves and of their students. Two examples given are the daily free recall (requiring students to write for 10 minutes daily on what they learned) and weekly summary sheets instead of more traditional homework questions.

These directed summaries or reflections can require or recommend:

• retrieval of information and knowledge
• visualization
• diagrams
• lyrics and poetry
• generation: rephrasing in new words
• elaboration: connections of new information to previous learning
• plans on how to use new information differently

The authors’ discussion of reflections echo the work we have done in this district on using the best practice of summarizing, described in Wormeli’s and Marzano’s research and texts. I was surprised at how allowing some of my students to create a song as their summary to a few nights’ reading showed their ability to use many levels of learning and thinking. Having all of us in the class sing their lyrics (to the melody of the Addams family, including finger snapping) probably helped some students learn the content better than my categorization chart.  Certainly one of my students learned more from composing a law of supply rap than completing another vocab graphic.

Quick quizzes: To counter the “illusion of knowing” or a false familiarity that comes when students reread, highlight, skim, or work without owning a purpose, use low stakes testing as a “tool for learning.”  

Old school: flash cards.  New edtech: Flubaroo, Quizlet, Kahoots, Socrative

Testing groups instead of study groups.


Collaborative item analysis: A biology professor described in Make it Stick provides a few structures that support this type of learning: She has students (or you can provide) a few different answers to questions and asks students to raise fingers that match the number of the answer they chose. Students are directed to talk to another student who raised a number of fingers different from their own choice and share their reasoning.  
This activity can be also done with a shared document, using index cards, or random or teacher chosen pairings.

Combining content coverage with metacognitive skill development

At times our most diligent students “do the work” but don’t know what they don’t know.  Frequent informal quizzes can address this problem and model an effective learning strategy. Being transparent about your pedagogy and providing students with your reasons for for using quick quizzes instead of or as a supplement to traditional homework or classwork will teach our students how to learn and metacognitive skills.  

The biology professor also provides vocabulary to assist her students’ metacognition. Her students alert her that they have an “illusion of knowing” and ask how they can do better.

(page 230).  I ask my students to “continue their learning” rather than do test corrections.

Low stakes quizzes and formative assessments take time to generate but, with the help of your course teams and giving yourself a few years teaching your course, over time you can build a bank of quiz questions.  You can also substitute traditional homework questions for these quick quizzes. And more and more textbook publishers, data management, and testing services are providing assessments that can be used to support this work.

This type of retrieval activity does not limit our students’ critical thinking skills, but will build the knowledge they need for higher ordered learning in our disciplines.

Please comment and share your own strategies that help your subject stick for your students.

Thank you to Joanne Miyahara and Carol Evans for encouraging me to read Make It Stick.

If we can’t make a mistake, we can’t make anything.*

At the start of the school year, we simultaneously focus on building community in our classrooms, while fostering the culture of learning challenging curriculum.  Being comfortable in a classroom does not exclude rigorous curriculum; in fact, the greater the safety, the greater the confidence to challenge oneself. By creating norms and processes for learning from mistakes, we encourage growth as well as a safe learning community.

How can BYOD support academically safe and challenging classrooms? In Identity Safety Classrooms, Steele and Cohn-Vargas, provide a few examples of how to “encourage students to ask for help” that we can adapt to our learning with devices as we provide challenging curriculum.

Encouraging Self-Assessment and Growth Mindset to Improve Performance

Steele and Cohn-Vargas describe one teacher who points out her own mistakes, a safe classroom norm that may be useful as we model “growth mindset”  when trying a new Learning in the Cloud and GAFE strategy.  Another teacher, they note in their chapter on Challenging Curriculum, has created a game which includes her students presenting errors to the class, followed by the whole class working to find and correct the “mistake in thinking”. This public analysis is is an indicator of and can promote a safe classroom.

Opportunities with Technology

One modification, more private and thus perhaps more appropriate at this time of year, would be to comment using our teacher device on a student’s work without walking up to the student. Many of our colleagues use this process, and students appreciate getting feedback without the rest of the class knowing they are getting help.  And many teachers are differentiating their feedback process by both responding from a device and also walking around the room to monitor, support, and extend student learning with a face to face conversation.  That dance between responding digitally and in person seems to create a safe, engaged, and challenging learning environment.

Using split screens can encourage student’s independent assessment and improvement. Using scissors and glue or other options described in earlier posts (add link here), ask each students to open their original work in one screen, and make a copy in a second screen. In the second screen they can make changes and explanations for the changes, possibly in a new color.  Once they have completed their revision, they should paste their original work above their revised work and turn in that second document.  If more useful, the shared or opposite screen can be the assignment's rubric that the student can use to inform their revisions.  

If appropriate, students can do this revision process in pairs. I have allowed students the choice to revise their work on their own or do this work in pairs, getting feedback from a peer.

This second document, now with 2 versions of a response, can be kept as a part of a journal or learning log or turned in to you.  You should have better work to review and both you and the students will have documentation of their academic skills and content growth.

Our Goals

Encouraging editing and improvement supports Autonomy and Competence, using pairs honors Diversity as a resource, and using devices and collaboration supports 21st Century college and career expectations.  

There are many ways to use devices to support student peer and self assessments; watch for more posts and professional development opportunites.  But for now, just using a split screen is an easy way to use devices for revisions.

In closing, here is another anecdote I just read that supports making mistakes to help us make something:  From the ubiquitous Humans of New York and Iran:

“(My father)’d bring me to work with him and trust me with jobs. He’d take apart mechanical devices and ask me to reassemble them. If I made a mistake, he’d never punish me. He’d even help me hide my report card if I made a bad grade. He was mainly concerned with building my confidence to attempt new things, so that I could always learn by doing. Now as an adult, people call me crazy for attempting things that seem ‘out of my depth.’ This bridge is one example. Nobody is prouder of this bridge than my father. He collects all the newspaper articles.”- Leila Araghian

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Leila Araghian and Alireza Behzadi are the young designer and builder behind Tehran’s recently completed Tabiat Bridge. Construction of the bridge was completed in 2014 despite the difficulties of international sanctions. The bridge has become a cultural and physical centerpiece of Tehran, and Leila captured the imagination of the architecture world by winning the right to design it at the age of 26. (Tehran, Iran)

*a poster in a favorite Kindergarten classroom.