Formative Assessment

One of the struggles many teachers have is with formative assessment. Not so much coming up with and administering formative assessments, that isn't difficult. The difficulty lies in achieving the goals of the formative assessment. Formative assessments are typically intended to do assess the following goals.

Provide the teacher with information about what the student currently understands in order to determine future lessons and the need for review.

Provide the student with information about their progress and what needs to be reviewed prior to moving on to the next lesson.

All of this hinges on the second goal. Ultimately, we want students to be the proprietor of their learning. The struggle comes with keeping students engaged and allowing them to get meaningful information from the assessment. How do you make the assessment meaningful? Here are a few ideas.

[embed]https://youtu.be/Unodyw8ZE3A[/embed]

Here are 10 Fun-Filled Formative Assessment Ideas from Edutopia. The Scholastic website provides this article What Are Formative Assessments and Why We Should Use Them. Finally, this article, Formative Assessment Practices to Support Student Learning from the Teaching Channel website also provides some videos of teachers using formative assessments in the classroom.

The important idea to remember with formative assessments is that they are a checkpoint. Use them to see if you are the students are seeing success with your current approach. If you are, great, keep going. If not, find what you need to change or who needs extra help.

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