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152'Oriental Art and Culture" Scientific-Methodical Journal - (3) III/2020
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TYPES OF ASSESSMENT: FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
Rakhimova Shahnoza Abdusharipovna Urgench State University
Abstract: This article proposes deep explanation of formative assessment at teaching EFL. Practice in a classroom is formative to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited.
Key words: Formative assessment, content, performance, feedback, activity, improve.
Introduction. Formative assessment, including diagnostic testing, is a range of formal and informal assessment procedures conducted by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment. It typically involves qualitative feedback (rather than scores) for both student and teacher that focuses on the details of content and performance. It is commonly contrasted with summative assessment, which seeks to monitor educational outcomes, often for purposes of external accountability.
Versus summative assessment
The type of assessment that people may be more familiar with is summative assessment. The table below shows some basic differences between the two types of assessment.
Summative Assessment Formative Assessment
When At the end of a learning activity During a learning activity
Goal To make a decision To improve learning
Feedback Final judgement Return to material
Frame of Reference Sometimes normative (comparing each student against all others); sometimes criterion Always criterion (evaluating students according to the same criteria)
Rationale and practice
Formative assessment serves several purposes:
to provide feedback for teachers to modify subsequent learning activities and
experiences;
to identify and remediate group or individual deficiencies; to move focus away from achieving grades and onto learning processes, in order to increase self efficacy and reduce the negative impact of extrinsic motivation; to improve students' metacognitive awareness of how they learn.
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"frequent, ongoing assessment allows both for fine-tuning of instruction and student focus on progress.
Characteristics of formative assessment:
According to Harlen and James (1997), formative assessment:
is essentially positive in intent, in that it is directed towards promoting learning; it is therefore part of teaching;
it takes into account the progress of each individual, the effort put in and other aspects of learning which may be unspecified in the curriculum; in other words, it is not purely criterion-referenced;
it has to take into account several instances in which certain skills and ideas are used and there will be inconsistencies as well as patterns in behaviour; such inconsistencies would be 'error' in summative evaluation, but in formative evaluation they provide diagnostic information;
validity and usefulness are paramount in formative assessment and should take precedence over concerns for reliability;
even more than assessment for other purposes, formative assessment requires that pupils have a central part in it; pupils have to be active in their own learning (teachers cannot learn for them) and unless they come to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and how they might deal with them, they will not make progress.
Feedback is the central function of formative assessment. It typically involves a focus on the detailed content of what is being learnt, rather than simply a test score or other measurement of how far a student is falling short of the expected standard. Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, synthesising from the literature, list seven principles of good feedback practice:
It clarifies what good performance is (goals, criteria, expected standards);
It facilitates the development of self-assessment in learning;
It provides high quality information to students about their learning;
It encourages teacher and peer dialogue around learning;
It encourages positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem;
It provides opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance;
It provides information to teachers that can be used to help shape teaching.
Evidence
Meta-analysis of studies into formative assessment have indicated significant learning gains where formative assessment is used, across all content areas, knowledge and skill types, and levels of education. Educational researcher Robert J. Marzano states:
“Recall the finding from Black and Wiliam's (1998) synthesis of more than 250 studies that formative assessments, as opposed to summative ones, produce the more
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powerful effect on student learning. In his review of the research, Terrance Crooks (1988) reports that effects sizes for summative assessments are consistently lower than effect sizes for formative assessments. In short, it is formative assessment that has a strong research base supporting its impact on learning.”
However, for these gains to become evident formative assessment must
(1) Clarify and share learning goals and success criteria;
(2) Create effective classroom discussions and other tasks which demonstrate evidence of student understanding;
(3) provide feedback which can and will be acted upon;
(4) allow students to become instructional resources for one another; and
(5) stimulate students to become owners of their own learning.
Some researchers have concluded that standards-based assessments may be an effective way to "prescribe instruction and to ensure that no child is left behind".
The strongest evidence of improved learning gains comes from short-cycle (over seconds or minutes within a single lesson) formative assessment, and medium to long-term assessment where assessment is used to change the teacher's regular classroom practice.
Strategies
Understanding goals for learning
It is important for students to understand the goals and the criteria for success when learning in the classroom. Often teachers will introduce learning goals to their students before a lesson, but will not do an effective job in distinguishing between the end goals and what the students will be doing to achieve those goals. "When teachers start from what it is they want students to know and design their instruction backward from that goal, then instruction is far more likely to be effective". In a study done by Gray and Tall, they found that 72 students between the ages of 7 and 13 had different experiences when learning in mathematics. The study showed that higher achieving students looked over mathematical ambiguities, while the lower achieving students tended to get stuck on these misunderstandings. The study showed that higher achieving students were able to look past this while other students were not.
Another study done by White and Frederiksen showed that when twelve 7 th grade science classrooms were given time to reflect on what they deemed to be quality work, and how they thought they would be evaluated on their work, the gap between the high achieving students and the low achieving students was decreased.
One way to help with this is to offer students different examples of other students' work so they can evaluate the different pieces. By examining the different levels of work, students can start to differentiate between superior and inferior work.
Questioning
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Questioning is an important part of the learning process and an even more important part is asking the right types of questions. Questions that promote discussion and student reflection make it easier for students to go on the right path to end up completing their learning goals. Here are some types of questions that are good to ask students:
What do you think of [student]'s answer?
What can we add to [student]'s explanation?
[Student] said this and [student] said that, but how can we combine these explanations into a complete answer?
Wait time
Wait time is the amount of time that is given to a student to answer a question that was posed and the time allowed for the student to answer. Mary Budd Rowe went on to look at the outcomes of having longer wait times for students. These included:
answers were longer;
failure to respond decreased;
responses from students were more confident;
students challenged and/or improved the answers of other students;
more alternative explanations were offered.
Peer-assessment
Having students assess each other's work has been studied to have numerous benefits:
When students know that they are going to be assessed by their peers, they tend to put more attention to detail in their work.
Students are able to speak to one another in a language that they are more comfortable with than they would be with an instructor. The insight of a fellow student might be more relatable than that of a teacher.
Students tend to accept constructive criticism more from a fellow student than from an instructor.
While students are in the process of peer-assessment, a teacher can more easily take command of the learning going on. The teacher can also stand on the sidelines and watch as the students continue to assess each other's work and may intervene at any time if need be.
Formative assessment is valuable for day-to-day teaching when used to adapt instructional methods to meet students' needs and for monitoring student progress toward learning goals. Further, it helps students monitor their own progress as they get feedback from the teacher and/or peers, allowing the opportunity to revise and refine their thinking. Formative assessment is also known as educative assessment, classroom assessment, or assessment for learning.
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Methods
There are many ways to integrate formative assessment into K-12 classrooms. Although the key concepts of formative assessment such as constant feedback, modifying the instruction, and information about students' progress do not vary among different disciplines or levels, the methods or strategies may differ. For example, researchers developed generative activities (Stroup et al., 2004) [30] and model-eliciting activities (Lesh et al., 2000)[31] that can be used as formative assessment tools in mathematics and science classrooms. Others developed strategies computer-supported collaborative learning environments (Wang et al., 2004b). More information about implication of formative assessment in specific areas is given below.
Purpose
Formative assessment, or diagnostic testing as the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards argues, serves to create effective teaching curricula and classroom-specific evaluations. By focusing on student-centered activities, a student is able to relate the material to his life and experiences. Students are encouraged to think critically and to develop analytical skills. This type of testing allows for a teacher's lesson plan to be clear, creative, and reflective of the curriculum (T.P Scot et al., 2009).
Specific applications
The following are examples of application of formative assessment to content areas:
In second/foreign language education
As an ongoing assessment it focuses on the process, it helps teachers to check the current status of their students' language ability, that is, they can know what the students know and what the students do not know. It also gives chances to students to participate in modifying or planning the upcoming classes (Bachman & Palmer, 1996). Participation in their learning grows students' motivation to learn the target language. It also raises students' awareness on their target languages, which results in resetting their own goals. In consequence, it helps students to achieve their goals successfully as well as teachers be the facilitators to foster students' target language ability.
In classroom, short quizzes, reflectionals journals, or portfolios could be used as a formative assessment (Cohen, 1994).
In elementary education
In primary schools, it is used to inform the next steps of learning. Teachers and students both use formative assessments as a tool to make decisions based on data. Formative assessment occurs when teachers feed information back to students in ways that enable the student to learn better, or when students can engage in a similar,
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self-reflective process. The evidence shows that high quality formative assessment does have a powerful impact on student learning. Black and Wiliam (1998) report that studies of formative assessment show an effect size on standardized tests of between 0.4 and 0.7, larger than most known educational interventions. (The effect size is the ratio of the average improvement in test scores in the innovation to the range of scores of typical groups of pupils on the same tests; Black and Wiliam recognize that standardized tests are very limited measures of learning.) Formative assessment is particularly effective for students who have not done well in school, thus narrowing the gap between low and high achievers while raising overall achievement. Research examined by Black and Wiliam supports the conclusion that summative assessments tend to have a negative effect on student learning.
Activities that can be used as assessment tools in math and science classrooms
Model-eliciting activities (MEAs)
Model-eliciting activities are based on real-life situations where students, working in small groups, present a mathematical model as a solution to a client's need (Zawojewski & Carmona, 2001). The problem design enables students to evaluate their solutions according to the needs of a client identified in the problem situation and sustain themselves in productive, progressively effective cycles of conceptualizing and problem solving. Model-eliciting activities (MEAs) are ideally structured to help students build their real-world sense of problem solving towards increasingly powerful mathematical constructs. What is especially useful for mathematics educators and researchers is the capacity of MEAs to make students' thinking visible through their models and modeling cycles. Teachers do not prompt the use of particular mathematical concepts or their representational counterparts when presenting the problems. Instead, they choose activities that maximize the potential for students to develop the concepts that are the focal point in the curriculum by building on their early and intuitive ideas. The mathematical models emerge from the students' interactions with the problem situation and learning is assessed via these emergent behaviors.
Generative activities
In a generative activity, students are asked to come up with outcomes that are mathematically same. Students can arrive at the responses or build responses from this sameness in a wide range of ways. The sameness gives coherence to the task and allows it to be an "organizational unit for performing a specific function." (Stroup et al., 2004)
Other activities can also be used as the means of formative assessment as long as they ensure the participation of every student, make students' thoughts visible to each other and to the teacher, promote feedback to revise and refine thinking. In addition,
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as a complementary to all of these is to modify and adapt instruction through the information gathered by those activities.
In computer-supported learning
Many academics are seeking to diversify assessment tasks, broaden the range of skills assessed and provide students with more timely and informative feedback on their progress. Others are wishing to meet student expectations for more flexible delivery and to generate efficiencies in assessment that can ease academic staff workloads. The move to on-line and computer based assessment is a natural outcome of the increasing use of information and communication technologies to enhance learning. As more students seek flexibility in their courses, it seems inevitable there will be growing expectations for flexible assessment as well. When implementing online and computer-based instruction, it is recommended that a structured framework or model be used to guide the assessment.
Benefits for teachers
Teachers are able to determine what standards students already know and to what degree.
Teachers can decide what minor modifications or major changes in instruction they need to make so that all students can succeed in upcoming instruction and on subsequent assessments.
Teachers can create appropriate lessons and activities for groups of learners or individual students.
Teachers can inform students about their current progress in order to help them set goals for improvement.
Benefits for students
Students are more motivated to learn.
Students take responsibility for their own learning.
Students can become users of assessment alongside the teacher.
Students learn valuable lifelong skills such as self-evaluation, self-assessment, and goal setting.
Students become more adept at self-assessment
Common formative assessment
The practice of common formative assessments is a way for teachers to use assessments to beneficially adjust their teaching pedagogy. The concept is that teachers who teach a common class can provide their classes with a common assessment. The results of that assessment could provide the teachers with valuable information, the most important being who on that teacher team is seeing the most success with his or her students on a given topic or standard. It is essential to note that the purpose of this practice is to provide feedback for teachers, not necessarily students, so an assignment could be considered formative for teachers, but summative
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for students. Researchers Kim Bailey and Chris Jakicic have stated that common formative assessments "Promote efficiency for teachers, promote equity for students, provide an effective strategy for determining whether the guaranteed curriculum is being taught and, more importantly, learned, inform the practice of individual teachers, build a team's capacity to improve its program, facilitate a systematic, collective response to students who are experiencing difficulty, [and] offer the most powerful tool for changing adult behavior and practice."
Developing common formative assessments on a teacher team helps educators to address what Bailey and Jakicic lay out as the important questions to answer when reflecting on student progress.
These include:
What do we want students to know and do?
How do we know they are learning?
What do we do when they're not learning?
How do we respond when they've already learned the information?
Common formative assessments are a way to address the second question. Teachers can collect data on how students are doing to gain understanding and insight on whether students are learning, and how they are making sense of the lessons being taught. After gathering this data, teachers can proceed to develop systems and plans to address the third and fourth questions and, over several years, modify the first question to fit the learning needs of their specific students.
To make the practice of teacher teams, common formative assessments, and power standards the most advantageous, the practice of backwards design should be utilized. Backwards design is the idea in education that the summative assessment should be developed first and that all formative work and lessons leading up to that specific assessment should be created second. Tomlinson and McTighe wrote, “Although not a new idea, we have found that the deliberate use of backwards design for planning courses, units, and individual lessons results in more clearly defined goals, more appropriate assessments, and more purposeful teaching." More specifically, intervention and re-teaching time must be factored into the schedule. It is unrealistic to think that every student will get every topic perfect and ready to take the summative assessment on a prescribed schedule.
Examples of Formative Assessment
When incorporated into classroom practice, the formative assessment process provides information needed to adjust teaching and learning while they are still happening. The process serves as practice for the student and a check for understanding during the learning process. The formative assessment process guides teachers in making decisions about future instruction. Here are a few examples that
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may be used in the classroom during the formative assessment process to collect evidence of student learning.
Observations
The more we know about students, the more we can help them. Observations, sometimes called kid watching, can help teachers determine what students do and do not know. There are several instruments and techniques that teachers can use to record useful data about student learning. Here are a few:
Anecdotal Notes: These are short notes written during a lesson as students work in groups or individually, or after the lesson is complete. The teacher should reflect on a specific aspect of the learning (sorts geometric shapes correctly) and make notes on the student's progress toward mastery of that learning target. The teacher can create a form to organize these notes so that they can easily be used for adjusting instruction based on student needs.
Anecdotal Notebook: The teacher may wish to keep a notebook of the individual observation forms or a notebook divided into sections for the individual students. With this method, all of the observations on an individual student are together and can furnish a picture of student learning over time.
Anecdotal Note Cards: The teacher can create a file folder with 5" x 7" note cards for each student. See Observation Folder. This folder is handy for middle and high school teachers because it provides a convenient way to record observations on students in a variety of classes.
Labels or Sticky Notes: Teachers can carry a clipboard with a sheet of labels or a pad of sticky notes and make observations as they circulate throughout the classroom. After the class, the labels or sticky notes can be placed in the observation notebook in the appropriate student's section.
Whatever the method used to record observations on students' learning, the import thing is to use the data collected to adjust instruction to meet student needs.
Questioning
Asking better questions affords students an opportunity for deeper thinking and provides teachers with significant insight into the degree and depth of student understanding. Questions of this nature engage students in classroom dialogue that expands student learning. Questions should go beyond the typical factual questions requiring recall of facts or numbers. Paul Black, a noted authority on formative assessment, suggests that "more effort has to be spent in framing questions that are worth asking: that is, questions which explore issues that are critical to the development of students' understanding." (Black et al., 2003)
Discussion
Classroom discussions can tell the teacher much about student learning and understanding of basic concepts. The teacher can initiate the discussion by presenting
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students with an open-ended question. The goal is to build knowledge and develop critical and creative thinking skills. Discussions allow students to increase the breadth and depth of their understanding while discarding erroneous information and expanding and explicating background knowledge (Black and Wiliam 1998; Doherty 2003). By activating students as learning resources for one another there is the possibility of some of the largest gains seen in any educational intervention (Slavin, Hurley and Chamberlain 2003). The teacher can assess student understanding by listening to the student responses and by taking anecdotal notes.
Exit/Admit Slips
Exit Slips are written responses to questions the teacher poses at the end of a lesson or a class to assess student understanding of key concepts. They should take no more than 5 minutes to complete and are taken up as students leave the classroom. The teacher can quickly determine which students have it, which ones need a little help, and which ones are going to require much more instruction on the concept. By assessing the responses on the Exit Slips the teacher can better adjust the instruction in order to accomodate students' needs for the next class.
Admit slips are exactly like Exit Slips, but they are done prior to or at the beginning of the class. Students may be asked to reflect on their understanding of their previous night's homework, or they may reflect on the previous day's lesson if the question required a longer response time. Exit and Admit Slips can be used in all classes to integrate written communication into the content area.
Learning/Response Logs
Learning Logs are used for students' reflections on the material they are learning. This type of journal is in common use among scientists and engineers. In the log, students record the process they go through in learning something new, and any questions they may need to have clarified. This allows students to make connections to what they have learned, set goals, and reflect upon their learning process. The act of writing about thinking helps students become deeper thinkers and better writers. Teachers and students can use Learning Logs during the formative assessment process, as students record what they are learning and the questions they still have, and teachers monitor student progress toward mastery of the learning targets in their log entries and adjust instruction to meet student needs. By reading student logs and delivering descriptive feedback on what the student is doing well and suggestions for improvement, the teacher can make the Learning Log a powerful tool for learning.
Response Logs are a good way to examine student thinking. They are most often connected with response to literature, but they may be used in any content area. They offer students a place to respond personally, to ask questions, to predict, to reflect, to
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collect vocabulary and to compose their thoughts about text. Teachers may use Response Logs as formative assessment during the learning process.
Peer/SelfAssessments
Peer and self assessment help to create a learning community within the classroom. When students are involved in criteria and goal setting, self evaluation becomes a logical step in the learning process. Students become metacognitive and are more aware of their personal strengths and weaknesses. With peer assessment students begin to see each other as resources for understanding and checking for quality work against previously determined criteria. The teacher can examine the self assessments and the peer assessments and identify students' strengths and weaknesses. "When students are required to think about their own learning, articulate what they understand, and what they still need to learn, achievement improves." (Black and Wiliam 1998)
Practice Presentations
Just as in sports, practice before a classroom presentation is vital. Through practice and peer review, students can improve their presentation skills and the content of the presentation itself. The practice presentation should take place a few days before the final presentation due date. Students run through their presentations with the audience, their peers, evaluating the performance based on the previously established rubric criteria. An easy way for students to furnish feedback is through a T Chart. Students use the left column of the chart to comment on the positive aspects of the presentation, and they use the right columns to suggest changes that the presenter might make to improve the quality of the presentation. By listening to both the practice and final presentations the teacher can easily gauge the level of student understanding of critical concepts and adjust instruction to address any misconceptions.
Visual Representations
There are several forms of visual representation, or nonlinguistic representation, but one that offers assessment data for the teacher is the use of drawing. Graphic organizers can be used as visual representations of concepts in the content areas. Many of the graphic organizers contain a section where the student is expected to illustrate his/her idea of the concept. The Mind Map requires that students use drawings, photos or pictures from a magazine to represent a specific concept. The Verbal and Visual Word Association (VVWA) asks students to illustrate a vocabulary term. Both of these offer the teacher a quick way of assessing student depth of understanding regarding a specific concept and the ability to adjust instruction immediately to address student needs.
Kinesthetic Assessments
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These examples of the formative assessment process require students to incorporate movement to demonstrate their understanding of a topic or concept. Although usually connected with the Arts (dance, playing a musical piece) or physical education (dribbling a basketball, serving a volleyball), kinesthetic assessments can be used in the core content classrooms to furnish teachers with insight into their students' understandings and misconceptions concerning a concept. Kinesthetic assessments are a good way to add movement in the classroom and allow teachers to determine the depth of student learning to inform their instructional decisions.
Individual Whiteboards
Individual slates or whiteboards are a great way to hold all students in the class accountable for the work. They actively involve students in the learning and are a terrific tool in the formative assessment process because they give the teacher immediate information about student learning. When students complete their work and hold their whiteboard up, the teacher can quickly determine who is understanding and who needs help and adjust his/her instruction accordingly. Individual whiteboards are easy to make from melamine or tile board which are usually carried at a local home supply store.
Laundry Day
Laundry Day is a strategy in the formative assessment process mentioned by Cassandra Erkens in her article entitled "Scenarios on the Use of Formative Classroom Assessment" (2007). This is a strategy where students evaluate their own learning in preparation for a chapter or unit test. They group themselves in the classroom around four different kinds of laundry detergent: Tide, Gain, Bold and Cheer. In their chosen corner they will work on activities to enrich or improve their understanding of the required content. The teacher can readily assess the students' level of understanding of the basic concepts covered in the unit or chapter. The teacher provides support as needed, as well as help being provided by students who are sure they have mastered the content. None of the work generated during this time counts as a grade, but students are scaffolded to increase their chances of success on the upcoming test.
Four Corners
Four Corners is a quick strategy that can be used effectively in the formative assessment process for gauging student understanding. It can engage students in conversations about controversial topics. The four corners of the classroom can be labeled as Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, and Strongly Disagree. Present students with a statement, like "All students should wear uniforms to school," and have them move to the corner that expresses their opinion. Students could then discuss why they feel the way they do. The teacher can listen to student discussions and determine who
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has information to support their opinion and who does not. Another way to use Four Comers is associated with multiple choice quizzes. Label the corners of the classroom as A, B, C and D. Students respond to a teacher-created question by choosing the answer they feel is correct. They must be able to give a reason for their answer.
Constructive Quizzes
Periodic quizzes can be used during the formative assessment process to monitor student learning and adjust instruction during a lesson or unit. Constructive quizzes will not only furnish teachers with feedback on their students, but they serve to help students evaluate their own learning. The process is outlined in the document below. By using quizzes to furnish students with immediate feedback, the teacher can quickly determine the status of each student in relation to the learning targets, and students can learn more during the discussions that immediately follow the quizzes, instead of having to wait until the next day to see the results of the assessment in the form of a meaningless grade on the top of a paper. The teacher should use the results of these quizzes to adjust instruction immediately based on student outcomes.
Appointment Clock
The Appointment Clock is a simple strategy in the formative assessment process that can be embedded within a lesson. The teacher directs students to find the people with whom to schedule appointments at the quarter hour, the half hour, and the 45-minute mark. The teacher begins the lesson and provides information to move students to higher-order thinking. The teacher determines the stopping point and asks students to meet with their quarter hour appointment to discuss their thinking about a couple of questions the teacher has posed. The teacher walks around and listens to the conversations taking place between partners, noting any misconceptions or misunderstandings. The teacher uses this information to adjust instruction by redirecting the next segment of the lesson. Students meet with their half hour appointment and the teacher conducts the same informal observation and adjusts the third section of the lesson. Students continue this process until the lesson is complete. By structuring a lesson in the manner, the teacher is able to determine the current level of understanding for the class and for individual students, and make immediate adjustments to instruction to assist students in their learning.
Conclusion. What do class discussions, quick writes, reader response journals, quizzes, and writing conferences all have in common? They are all examples of the wide range of classroom-based activities that teachers use to measure how well their students are learning.
“Students crave feedback,” says Shannon Davis, an English teacher at Seward High School in Nebraska. “Good teaching requires that you give students feedback along the way in class. They can’t always assess themselves. Formative assessments
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enable me to show my students what they do know and have mastered and to point out what they need to spend more time with before the next quiz or test or whatever comes next. I can’t imagine teaching for more than a day without getting a sense of how the students are responding to the material. Formative assessment is just as important as summative.”
When Davis realizes students are struggling she’ll either re-teach a topic, put students in small groups so they can help one another, or hold another class discussion to clarify the material. Davis also uses reading checks to see how students are doing throughout the process of reading a long novel.
“If they stop understanding the story, we’ll slow down and review,” she says. “If they’re getting it and starting to get bored, we’ll pick up the pace.”
Summative assessment, an exam that comes at the end of a unit, for example, identifies those students who did not learn the material, but it does so too late to help them. With the advent of No Child Left Behind legislation and its emphasis on standardized, high-stakes summative testing, it is good to keep in mind that formative assessments provide more timely and accurate measures of what students are learning. NCTE supports formative assessment as the most valuable classroom tool for evaluating student learning in time to adjust teaching to meet student needs.
Brian Huot, professor of English and the writing program coordinator at Kent State University, suggests it’s important to avoid the trap of thinking “formative assessment: good, summative assessment: bad.”
“There are times, when students are struggling to learn, when formative assessment is very good,” he says. “But that does not mean summative assessment, or testing and giving out grades, is bad. Grades and tests are qualitatively different from formative assessments. They do different jobs.”
Teachers use formative assessment in a variety of ways.
The unit on Manifest Destiny had complex concepts the students needed to understand and were not “as simple as ‘choose a, b, or c’ on a multiple-choice test,” said Pierce. By having students perform an informal writing assignment, Pierce could determine whether or not the students grasped concepts in the unit as well as writing concepts, such as how to write a thesis paragraph. By looking at the responses, Pierce could make sure all students were up to speed before moving on and determine an approach if some were lagging. If some students were struggling, Pierce might pull that group of students out to do more instruction while the rest of the class worked on a different project.
“Formative assessment is a feedback loop between the teacher and the student. It is an assessment for learning rather than of learning,” she says.
This ability to see students both as individuals and as part of a group is what Heidi Mills, professor of elementary education at the University of South Carolina
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and one of the founders of the Center for Inquiry, a magnet elementary school, calls “kidwatching.” Kidwatching, a term coined in 1985 by Yetta Goodman, refers to observing and recording children’s literacy development. In the course of kidwatching, teachers also gain new understandings of the ways children think and learn. Ultimately, their observations help teachers plan curriculum and instruction that are tailored to individual strengths and needs.
For teachers who see many students in a day, one-on-one conversations may be rare, but there are many other ways to monitor student progress.
For example, Julie Waugh, another teacher at the Center for Inquiry, has her students keep reading logs. She asks them to review their own logs and reflect (in writing) on the kind of reading that they’re doing; to document what they are doing well and to set new goals for themselves as readers. She might see, for example, that the class is not reading poetry much which might lead her to invite students to participate in reading another genre. The big question she poses is, “What are we doing well, what makes sense for us to do next?”
How can teachers learn to use formative assessments to the best effect in their own classrooms? Pierce recommends something Richard Dufour, former superintendent of Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois, calls “professional learning communities.” These are groups of people within a school who have a shared focus (for example, American History) who come together regularly to look at student work and to answer three questions: what do we want students to know; how will we know if they know it; what will we do if they don’t.
“That’s not rocket science,” says Pierce. “But what is rocket science is that at Adlai Stevenson they’ve scheduled in time for teachers to engage in these meaningful conversations with their colleagues—with their students’ work, state learning objects, and other relevant material in front of them, and to have that be a focus. It’s teacher study groups but it’s driven by student learning rather than teacher learning.”
Formative assessments are particularly valuable for measuring how students are progressing toward learning goals because the results of the assessment give both the teacher and the student immediate feedback on what to do next.
References
1. National and KapodistrianUniversity of Athens, Bessie Dendrinos. Bessie Dendrinos. “ELT Methods and Practices. Teaching English to Young Learners ”. Edition: 1.0. Athens 2015. Available at: http://opencourses.uoa.gr/courses/ENL4
2. Cameron, L., 2001, Teaching languages to Young Learners.
3. www.englishmyway.co.uk/topics/131/243
4. British Council, Volunteer Materials, ESOL Nexus, 2015
5. https://www.ixl.com/ela/grade-26. Hasanova, D. (2007a).
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6. Broadening the boundaries of the expanding circle: English in Uzbekistan. World Englishes, 26(3), 276-290.
7. Hasanova, D. (2007b). Functional allocations of English in post-Soviet Uzbekistan: Pedagogical implications for English language teachers (Doctoral dissertation). VDM Verlag Dr. Muller: Germany.
8. Hasanova, D. (2007c). Teaching and learning English in Uzbekistan. English Today, 23(01), 3-9.
9. (http://www.englishmyway.co.uk/learning-circles/session-10).
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formative_assessment
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