Formative Assessment. The idea is not new to teachers. With
the KY Professional Growth System, teachers must select a student growth goal
and that leads to many formative assessments to find out what students do not
know, in order to create that growth goal.
According to LearnNC.org Formative Assessment
(FA) is the “Where am I going? Where am I now? And How can I close the gap
between the two?” While there are many
traditional FA routes, thanks to technology, there are many tools available to
formatively assess our students with instant feedback available. We have to learn to work smarter rather than harder.
Purpose
What’s the purpose of formative assessment? First and
foremost, FA is meant to measure student ability in order to inform our
instruction. Formative Assessment also informs students of what they know and don't know in order to create personalized learning goals for the classroom. When I begin a grammar unit, I assess my students to see what they
know and need to know. The tricky part
is what to do next. For me, grammar is
very easy to work with when it comes to FA. I pre-test students and those who
know it can either practice using the concept in a more challenging way or they
can move on to a different concept altogether. Those who do not know it or show weaknesses, will practice that concept until I hope they reach mastery.
One technique that a fellow- teacher uses is “Just for me
Mondays”. Students work on skills and concepts that they showed they did not
know through pre-tests, while other students move on to other skills. It takes a lot of work;
I won’t lie about that! Creating various activities and providing the practice
for each student is time-consuming and challenging, but students are getting
the materials they need in order to grow.
There is nothing worse than sitting through
lessons/lecture/activities that you have done and have already mastered (think
about those PD’s you sit through every year…). Formative Assessment keeps kids
moving forward because you know what they know and can do, as well as what they
need to improve upon.
Tools
There are many tools available to formatively assess
students and the traditional paper/pencil assessment is not out of the
question. Certainly there are times when the traditional route makes sense, but
gathering the data and recording it can be really challenging and frustrating. In our present age, we are lucky to have many
tools available that can assist us in formatively assessing our students, and
while I will highlight a few, there are many, many others available.
Plickers
What the heck are Plickers, you ask? The great thing about Plickers
is that you and only you need a smart phone to use them. Plickers is a card system that allows students
to do a quick multiple choice assessment. You display or ask the question,
students hold up the card so the letter answer is at the top of the card, and
you scan the room with your cell phone using the free Plickers APP. Each card number is assigned to a
student and you get a cumulative report of student answers. The app is free and
the cards are free and available HERE. And you can get the free App for your Smart Phone HERE.
Much like the student hand-held response systems that many
schools have for their active boards, Plickers simply require one piece of equipment
to run (your smart phone) and a set of laminated cards. You can log into the site or see on the APP an entire
class’ results quickly and easily.
Why use it? Variety. Brain research shows that a variety in instruction and assessment practices keeps kids interested. So while you can keep using that hand-held response system that goes with your active board, breaking it up once in a while with something different just changes things up and makes learning more interesting for students.
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| Plickers.com- Student Results |
Edmodo- Quiz/Grammar
apps
Edmodo is approved by most schools for student use; it is also safe and easy for teachers and students to navigate. Edmodo has several options
for gathering student results- there is a Quiz feature where you can create
various types of quizzes. Students take the quiz, which shows up as a post on
their “wall” and the results immediately transfer into your Edmodo gradebook
where you can view student performance. What I really like about the Edmodo quizzes is
that you can see each student’s individual results, but you can also see
results based on a breakdown of the questions. If the majority of the class
missed question 2, I can do a quick mini-lesson in class the next day to target
that question’s concept or skill. Now THAT is using assessment for instruction!
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| Individual Student Results on Edmodo Quiz |
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| Question Breakdown- Information for Quick Mini-lessons! |
Edmodo also offers many free or partially free apps and for
the ELA teacher there are two grammar apps- NoRedInk and Snapshot that assesses
students and provides quick results in various forms. These grammar apps are
connected to the Common Core Standards and are easy to assign and for students
to take. Snapshot , while the content is
limited for the free version of the app, provides a much more detailed breakdown
of student understanding than NoRedInk does. Snapshot also assesses in Reading CCS.
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| NoRedInk Student Results |
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| Snapshot Individual Student Results |
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| Snapshot Results by Standard |
Using the Result by Standard in Snapshot, a teacher can quickly adjust instruction in order to target a concept the whole class is struggling with or create small group/personalized instruction for those few students who are not understanding the concept or skill.
BlendSpace
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| Sample Narrative BlendSpace Module I created |
BlendSpace provides a
quiz feature at the end of the module and student results are displayed in your
“gradebook”. This site is a great way to
flip instruction. I use BlendSpace to give students basic notes on Narrative
Writing, for example, something they have been exposed to for at least 3 or 4
years. Rather than take up class time to “do notes”, I have students do the
work at home so we can jump into the meat of writing in class. I can also quickly see what aspect of narrative writing the majority of my students don't "get" for added mini-lessons or individualized instruction in small groups for those concepts that only a few don't understand.
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| BlendSpace Student Results by Question |
Here's the thing- there are so many tech tools out there that gather and sort the results for you! Formative assessment is not always easy, but for those who truly want to reach each child in instruction, it is necessary. After you formatively assess, the biggest obstacle can be aggregating that data. Thankfully, there are now many tech tools that can assist us in this monumental task.
How Do you both Formatively Assess AND Gather/Sort the data? What strategies in ELA do you use to take that data and DO something with it? Please Share!!
Further Resources on Formative Assessment:
What is the Difference between Formative and Summative Assessment? LINK
Traditional Strategies to Formatively Assess- LINK
Teachers Share Formative Assessment Strategies on Edutopia
Photo at top of blog: photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/7815007@N07/16680898638">Educational Postcard about teachers working smarter using formative assessment</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/">(license)</a>
