What is Formative Assessment?
Formative assessment is assessment of students that is designed to improve learning as opposed to evaluating learning. Formative assessment is often ungraded, can be obtrusive (interrupting the learning) or unobtrusive (as part of the learning process). The key component of formative assessment is the feedback provided by teachers. Feedback must be meaningful and purposeful with the goal of improving student learning. Feedback should also help students’ build metacognitive skills encouraging self-reflection of their learning processes.
Formative assessments should be criterion based rather than norm-referenced. These assessments should measure student progress against the criteria of the learning outcome or standard as opposed to comparing students with students. However, students can be measured individually, as a group, or as a whole class through a variety of strategies and measurement tools. Which will be discussed below.
Formative assessment is also used to improve instructional practice by allowing teachers to review teaching strategies and improve them to better facilitate learning in their classrooms. Teachers should continually assess and reassess with the goal of differentiating instruction throughout the entire process. Teachers should provide students with the opportunity to revise and improve their performance on specific assessments. When designing formative assessments teachers should ask themselves:
- What is the standard or objective I am trying to teach?
- What learning outcome do I expect my students to be able to demonstrate or do at the end of the lesson or unit?
- How can I synthesize the ‘Big Ideas’ into smaller chunks of learning?
- What prior knowledge do my students have already?
Formative assessment should be aligned with a standard or outcome and closely aligned with post-summative assessments. Teachers should use formative assessments to gauge how close students are to satisfying the learning standard or outcome. Students should be formatively assessed on a standard or learning outcome many times and improvement tracked. They can be implemented before, during, and after units or lessons. Formative assessments should meet the criteria of SMART goals. They should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Especially timely in reference to teacher feedback. Feedback should have a quick turnaround so that the students can use feedback to improve their learning and teachers to revise instructional practices or strategies as needed.
Teachers should take the ‘Big Ideas’ of a topic and break it down into ‘Essential Standards’. Essential standards are the key items that students must know in order to accomplish the learning outcomes and what students must know in order to be successful at the next learning level or grade. It is best to work with other teachers teaching the same grade level and subject, the district, lower grade teachers, and curriculum directors in order to decide what standards are essential for students to be able to progress to higher levels of learning. However, teachers can, if they have to, tackle this task on their own.
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