Why Formative Assessment?
What is formative assessment?
Formative assessment is a process, which involves collecting "small data" about your students, reflecting, and making adjustments. The best formative assessments involve reflective and self-assessment activities for both teachers and students.
Formative assessment seeks to:
1. take the pulse of student learning
2. be formal like analyzing exit tickets, or can be casual like "feeling the room" and
making adjustments
3. make learning more reflective for students and teachers
Formative assessment is not:
1. a proficiency test with no feedback, or chances for student to revise or to improve
2. just asking questions about content
Why use formative assessments?
Anyone who has taught long enough knows how few things a teacher can control about the learning process. Teachers can not control their students' home lives, their prior understanding of topics, or their feelings about the subject matter before they enter your class. Therefore, even though teachers can plan, they can not script their lessons.
Formative assessments can help teachers create a "toolbox" of strategies and activities, which allow them to meet students where they are and help bring them to where they need to be. Because each student is different, good teaching involves constantly making adjustments based on student feedback to adapt the lesson, and ensure that it targets and challenges the most amount of students effectively.
No teacher likes to spend enormous amounts of time and energy developing lessons and assessments to find out that their students did not understand the material. Embedding formative assessments can help teachers increase their ability to reach more students, and feel more comfortable that their students are with them throughout the class.
