EDUC 7726 - Week 8 Formative Assessment

Formative assessment is when teachers provide ongoing feedback to students through out the unit to improve their learning. Formative assessments help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work and help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately. - Carnegie Mellon University -

Many teachers use formative assessment in the classroom.  Formative assessment can be done at different points during the course of the lesson.

Previewing a Lesson:

      Before beginning a new lesson, many times student are unsure of what the new unit holds for them.  To begin the unit on a good foot, many teachers start each day with a daily review exercise to keep the students' minds remembering what was learned in the previous day.  As a different approach to beginning an entirely new unit, teachers can use Beyond Question Clickers or Smart Notebook Clickers (whichever they have available) to create short quizzes for the students.  These are interactive devices where the students must answer the multiple choice or true/false questions by choosing the correct choice on their personal remote. The system will then grade the quiz for you.  These questions can be embedded into a powerpoint as well.

During the Learning:

      During learning, it is sometimes difficult to assess students.  As a teacher you constantly as the students if 
they have questions, but they always say no, or you are answered by silence so you move on to the next topic.  With Today's Meet you can give the classroom a name (Room 203) and students can sign in each day.  Today's Meet can be left on the projection screen and if students have questions, all they have to do is type them in and it will automatically send and add to the list. This is a backchannel where you can see everything the students really want to ask, but are afraid to.  The students can put their name or they can be anonymous.  They are limited to 140 characters, similar to twitter, so their questions can be short.

After the lesson:

      For many instructors, once a lesson or unit is over, it is time for a test or a quiz.  This usually results in a type of assessment.  In order for the students to prepare for the assessment, have the students review in a fun and interactive way. The students will play a FREE game based blended learning and response system called Kahoot!  As the teacher, you can create the questions using any device, build quizzes with images and video, or find pre-made quizzes.  Students can use any device with a web browser including a laptop, IPad, IPhone, IPod, Android, Chromebook, PC, and more. If they do not have one, they can share with a friend and be a "team". You can project the quiz on the screen at the front of the room to engage students in the game.  Without each student needing an account, logging on is quick and their name appears on a list at the front of the room.  This is also a great way for students to prepare for the summative assessment while having fun at the same time.

1. The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically,formative assessments: help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work. - Carnegie Mellon University-