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.

Speaking and Listening: The Power of Pronouns, the Strength of a Salutation

We have now completed the first quarter of teaching and learning for the 2015-16 school year. These posts focused on building a community to serve as a foundation for the content and critical thinking skills we  teach and our students learn during the first month of this academic year.  With a strong and safe community started, the second month of posts focused on verbs and nouns that can be used to elevate students understanding and mastery of the 21st Century college and career skills they need when they leave us.

This week I am turning to pronouns to merge both tending to our community while using powerful language that will enable our students’ intellectual growth.  

How might a salutation sting or a pronoun be powerful?

Many of us address our classes with “Ladies and Gentleman.” The salutation is meant as a form of respect - letting our students know that we don’t see them as children.

But to honor the diversity, including gender identity, in our community, it it time to review and potentially revise our choice of nouns and pronouns.The respectful language we expect and employ can protect and build the identity safety students need to grow.

Use a student's name instead of the potentially incorrect pronoun. Speak of “adults in your lives” rather than of parents, to honor those students who do not live with their parents. Substitute participant for citizen.  Perhaps even greet the class as Academic Aztecs, Educated Eagles, or Scholarly Spartans to respect gender diversity.

Changing our common nouns and pronouns will protect and honor some of our most vulnerable students and model thoughtful speaking and listening for all of our students.

MVLAUSHD does a great job of caring for and about all of our students and purposefully fostering a safe community, but painful language use persists for our students.

Data as a call to action

In their February 2014 publication, the California School Boards Association policy brief, the authors cited a study illustrating the common experience students have hearing hurtful speech:

In a national study* of students in grades 6-12, the majority reported hearing homophobic remarks frequently or often: 85 percent frequently or often heard “gay” used in a negative way, 71 percent heard other homophobic remarks and 61 percent heard negative remarks about students not acting “masculine enough” or “feminine enough.”

*Kosciw, J.G., Greytak, E.A., Bartkiewicz, M.J., Boesen, M.J., & Palmer, N.A. (2012). The 2011 National School Climate Survey: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in Our Nation’s Schools. New York: Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. Available athttp://bit.ly/1ekZRv9

Our own words as teachers – while never intentionally painful – are particularly poignant for students. Potentially easier than the homework and revision policy discussions, we can also review the messages we send through our language.

One purpose of public high schools is to have one more chance at developing positive and powerful participants for our democratic society.  Purposeful pronouns and inclusive nouns can be a start as we continue to build a safe community and model our own growth mind set for our students.

Thank you to my many colleagues in the MVLAUHSD  who helped to articulate this concern.

A few more sources:

Teaching Tolerance’s Best Practices: Creating an LGBT-inclusive School Climate and

Teaching Tolerance's posting "the Problems with  Pronouns

The Vocabulary Deficit Or Why add another thing to my to-do list?

With new data just released from SBAC scores and headlines like  Income inequality in Bay Area exceeds national levels from SF Gate on July 30, 2015, we have a specific call to action for teaching and learning in the MVLA district.

While we know diversity is a resource in our classrooms, being aware of the economic diversity in our classrooms adds another needed dimension to teaching and learning literacy.

The SF Gate article cites a 2013 study that found that the “Households with incomes among the top five percent of all households in the Bay Area “have average incomes of $489,000, according to the institute.That is 31.5 times the average income of the households at the bottom 20 percent of all Bay Area households, who earn about $15,500.”


Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Mountain View data

Data from the Santa Clara County Department of Public Health indicates that we 22% of our children ages 0-17 in Mountain View, 6% in Los Altos Hills, and 2% in Los Altos live in poverty.  Being an economically disadvantaged teen in our high schools is a very challenging minority status.

What does the data  mean for our students and our teaching?

Research continues to indicate that students from lower income households have learned “30 million less words by age three than other three year olds.” (Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley)

Without intervention, the gap grows. Those with lower reading scores get less exposure to and practice with challenging academic language, resulting in cumulative deficits (Louisa Moats, 2014) and a continued risk of an exponential falling behind.

And then reading becomes even more difficult for our students after grade 5: At grade 5 students are expected to learn at least 3,000 new word meanings per year from reading and direct instruction, just to keep up. Words are topic-specific and low-frequency. More background knowledge is required to make inferences and construct the meaning of the whole text.  Sentences are longer, more complex, and contain more ideas. Stamina and persistence are expected; meaning is constructed over longer segments of text.  (Moats, 2014)

The student who guesses, who has no strategies and confuses similar sounds, little automatic/previous exposure, or informed recognition, can’t decode, so if you don’t have the word recognition you get tired…  (Hart and Risley)

When They Get to MVLA

As we ask our students to do more reading, writing, and explaining, it is crucial for us to address any vocabulary deficits that prevent our students from working with challenging material.

Increased literacy improves our students’ ability to understand complex texts and explain their own thinking.  Greater literacy not only allows us to more authentically assess and address their mastery of content and skills, but it empowers our students for a lifetime of interacting with complex ideas.

Our call to action isn’t just to compensate for the inequities in knowledge stemming from inequities of wealth, but also to give our students the tools needed to succeed at the Common Core, understanding that because Common Core are potentially new standards, some of our current high school students have not had the benefit of a robust literacy education.

What We Can Do

Below are two groups of verbs for you to consider using with our students. These words can be added to your directions, prompts, and instruction.  Focusing on directive verbs helps students understand what type of thinking they should be doing.  When our students aren’t fluent with sophisticated or complex verbs, they might not understand what is expected of them.  For example, if asked to “discriminate” a student may think it is always an act they should avoid, rather than realize that they may be being asked to note differences.  Teaching and using sophisticated, complex, and varied prompts and directions can address inequities and empower all of our students.

 

The following are the “Critical Verbs,” (M. Springer) listed by grade level of expected mastery for CCSS. Thus, the expectation is that our juniors will be competent in all of the following skills.

Kindergarten: compare, contrast, describe, distinguish, identify , retell

1st grade: demonstrate, determine, draw, explain, locate, suggest, support

2nd grade: comprehend, develop

3rd grade: organize, refer

4th grade infer, integrate, interpret, paraphrase, summarize

5th grade: analyze

6th grade: articulate, cite, delineate, evaluate, trace

11th grade: synthesize.

The following is a list of verbs grouped by skills.  

As you assign a particular task or activity, you can add to the depth of their work while also expanding your students’ vocabulary and literacy. (Marzano, Kinsella, CCSS)

Add To	Create/Develop	Evaluate	Prove & Argue	Seek Information
deepen	accomplish	assess	assert	capture
incorporate	achieve		confirm	compile
integrate	build	Execute	qualify	elicit
	compose	advance	specify	encounter
Arrange	construct	employ	justify	evoke
sort	form	navigate	challenge
	generate		claim	Symbolize
Collaborate	initiate	Explain	promote	depict
engage	stimulate	articulate	verify	model
interact		narrate
	Decide	recount	Pull Apart	Think Metacognitively
Compare/Contrast	select	synthesize	decompose	appreciate
associate		clarify	decontextualize	attend
categorize	Define	convey	diagnose	monitor
differentiate	delineate		grapple	preserve
discriminate	discern	Pose	partition	reflect
link	establish	hypothesize	Probe
relate	exemplify			Transform
connect	recall	Infer	Reference	accentuate
distinguish	determine	deduce	acknowledge	conform
accomplish		infer	trace	convert
	Elaborate		cite	manipulate
	broaden	Measure		adapt
	derive	gauge	Big Picture	revise
	enhance	quantify	contextualize
	elaborate		orient
	expand	Problem Solve
		overcome
		surmount
		resolve