What Is a Formative Assessment in a Lesson Plan

7. Self-assessment: Do not forget to consult the experts – children. Often, you can give your students your rubric and let them recognize their strengths and weaknesses. For more introverted students – or for more private critics – use Flipgrid, Explain Everything, or Seesaw to have students record their responses to prompts and demonstrate what they can do. In these methods, you`ll find nearly 40 tools and tips to find out what your students know while they`re still learning. 1. Entry and Exit Slips: These marginal minutes at the beginning and end of class can provide great ways to find out what children remember. Start the course with a short question about the work from the day before while students settle in – for example, you can ask differentiated questions written on graphic paper or projected onto the blackboard. Since you can design the questions yourself, you determine the degree of complexity. Ask questions at the end of Bloom`s taxonomy and you`ll get an overview of the facts, vocabulary, or processes that children remember.

Ask more complicated questions (“What advice do you think Katniss Everdeen would offer Scout Finch if they spoke at the end of chapter 3?”), and you`ll get more sophisticated information. The use of digital strategies for formative assessment is one of the things we do extensively in our online program. For example, students have many quizzes and assignments in class that ask them to apply the concepts of the class modules and answer the questions. When a point is answered correctly, comments appear that reinforce why it is a correct answer (in case the student really did not know it and was content to guess it). If the answer is incorrect, the comments will appear immediately to explain why the answer was wrong. Providing immediate feedback in these formative learning activities is invaluable in strengthening their understanding of the key concepts presented. It is important to recognize the difference between formative and summative evaluations. Everyone should be designed to focus on their strengths, and as educators, we should make sure to develop assessment tools that adequately measure or evaluate what we are really looking for. Formative and summative journals work best when used together.

I see this cooperative use of formative and summative assessments as one of the main benefits of mixed digital degree programs. Digital strategies are particularly useful for integrating formative assessments into a low-anxiety method to reinforce critical concepts. Another common problem with summative journals is the type of questions that many summative journals end up filling. In Lessons Plans 04, we talked about using the Bloom taxonomy to create test questions. It is difficult to write quality test questions in the different areas of this taxonomy. As a result, a disproportionate number of elements are written in the lowest levels of taxonomy, as this is the easiest to write. Therefore, many summative assessments focus on memorizing facts and information without assessing the student`s ability to put that information into practice. I believe that in many of our education programs, there is too much emphasis on summative evaluation and not enough on formative evaluation. We have summative assessments at the end of our lessons, but we may not realize until the end of the lesson that students have not really solidified their understanding of certain concepts. Then it is too late to check them to correct them.

Learn how to use formative assessments more broadly, and you`ll likely see your students improve significantly in their scores and eventual success goals. 5. Methods that incorporate art: Consider using visual arts, photography, or videography as an assessment tool. Whether students are drawing, creating a collage, or modeling, you may find that assessment helps them synthesize their learning. Or think beyond the visual and let children live their understanding of the content. You can create a dance to model cellular mitosis, or piece together stories like Ernest Hemingway`s “Hills Like White Elephants” to explore the subtext. Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) Formative Assessment and Self-Regulated Learning: A Model and Seven Principles of Good Feedback Practices. Higher Education Study 31(2): 2-19. Assessment allows both the instructor and the student to monitor progress towards learning objectives and can be addressed in several ways.

Formative assessment refers to tools that identify misunderstandings, struggles, and learning gaps along the way and assess how to fill those gaps. It contains effective tools to shape learning and can even strengthen students` abilities to take responsibility for their learning if they understand that the goal is to improve learning rather than apply the final grade (Trumbull and Lash, 2013). This may involve students evaluating themselves, their peers, or even the teacher through writing, quizzes, conversations, etc. In short, formative assessment takes place during a course or course and aims to improve the achievement of students` learning objectives through approaches that can meet the specific needs of students (Theal and Franklin, 2010, p. 151). One of the main benefits of formative assessment is that it can help faculty members recognize when students (as a group) are not proficient in a key concept. Too often, teachers don`t realize that students didn`t have a basic idea taught in class until many of them didn`t do well on an exam after class time ended. Formative assessment activities throughout the learning process would help the trainer to grasp these elements earlier so that they can be reinforced before the exams assessed at the end of the learning module. Or skip the words altogether and have students draw or circle emojis to represent their assessment of their understanding. Formative assessment – determining what students know while they are still learning it – can be challenging. Designing the right assessment can look like high-level teachers rather than students, as it allows us to determine what happens next. Are we ready to move on? Do our students need a different way of getting into the concepts? Or, more likely, which students are willing to continue and which need in a different way? Effectively implementing assessments in an online teaching environment can be particularly challenging.

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