There’s talk aplenty in schools these days about formative assessment. That’s encouraging, because formative assessment has great potential to improve both teaching and learning. Listening to the conversations sometimes, however, reminds me that it’s easier to register to a word than to live out its fundamental principle.

Formative assessment is—or should be—the bridge between today’s lesson and tomorrow’s. Both its alignment with current content goals and its immediacy in providing insight about student understanding are necessary to helping teacher and student see how to make near-term adjustments so the progression of learning can proceed as it should.

The best teachers work persistently to benefit the learners in their charge. Because teaching is too complex to invite perfection, even the best teachers will miss the mark on some days,  but in general, teachers who use sound formative assessment aspire to the following 10 principles.

1. Help students understand the role of formative assessment.

Students often feel that assessment equals test equals grade equals judgment. That association leads many discouraged students to give up rather than to risk another failure. It causes many high-achieving students to focus on grades rather than learning, and on safe answers rather than thoughtful ones.

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2. Begin with clear KUDs.

The first step in creating a worthy formative assessment occurs well before the teacher develops the assessment. It happens when the teacher begins to map out curriculum. At that point, the teacher asks the pivotal question, “What is most important for students to Know, Understand, and be able to Do as a result of this segment of learning?”

Alignment between KUDs and formative assessments—and later, between formative assessment results and instructional plans—is imperative if formative assessment is to fulfill its promise.

 

3. Make room for student differences.

            The most useful formative assessments make it possible for students to show what they know, understand, and can do; therefore, it’s useful for teachers to build some flexibility into formative assessments. In formative assessments (as in summative ones), it’s acceptable—and often wise—to allow students some latitude in how they express what they know, understand, and can do.

4. Provide instructive feedback.

Although formative assessments should rarely be graded, students do need useful feedback. Comments like, “Nice job,” “I enjoyed this,” or “Not quite” don’t help learners understand what they did well or how they missed the mark. Feedback needs to help the student know what to do to improve the next time around

They trust that teachers will use the assessments to help them achieve, and they know that there will soon be follow-up opportunities for them to use the feedback in improving their performance.

5. Make feedback user-friendly.

Feedback should be clear, focused, and appropriately challenging for the learner. As teachers, we sometimes feel our job is to mark every error on a paper. To realize its power, feedback must result in a student thinking about how to improve—the ideal is to elicit a cognitive response from the learner, not an emotional one (Wiliam, 2011).Praise and shame shut down learning far more often than they catalyze it. It’s more fruitful to straightforwardly share with students their particular next steps in the learning process, based on goals that are clear to teacher and student alike.

6. Assess persistently.

Formative assessment should permeate a class period. A great teacher is a habitual student of his or her students. A keen observer, the teacher is constantly watching what students do, looking for clues about their learning progress, and asking for input from students about their status. These teachers walk among their students as they work, listening for clues about their understanding, asking questions that probe their thinking, taking notes on what they see and hear. They ask students to signal their level of confidence with the task they are doing with thumbs-up, thumbs-down, or thumbs-sideways,

7. Engage students with formative assessment.

It’s easy for teachers to stick with the traditional classroom paradigm that casts them in the role of giver and grader of tests, diagnoser of student needs, and prescriber of regimens. Things go much better, however, when students are fully engaged in the assessment process.

Students benefit from examining their own work in light of rubrics that align tightly with content goals and point toward quality of content, process, and product—or in comparison to models of high-quality work that are just a bit above the student’s current level of performance.

8. Look for patterns.

Patterns will vary widely with the focus of the assessment. In one instance, a teacher may see some students who have already mastered the content, others who are fine with computations but not word problems, still others who know how to tackle the word problems but are making careless errors, and another group that is struggling with prerequisite knowledge or skills.

The possibilities are many, but the goal is to look for clusters of student need and plan ways to help each group of students move ahead.

9. Plan instruction around content requirements and student needs.

Formative assessment is a means to design instruction that’s a better fit for student needs, not an end in itself.Sometimes,formative assessment will indicate that everyone in the class needs more practice with a certain skill or more engagement with a particular understanding.

An assessment is really only a formative assessment when teachers collect  evidence about student performance, interpret that evidence, and use it to provide teaching that is more likely to benefit student learning than the instruction those teachers would have delivered if they had continued forward without using what they learned through the assessment (Wiliam, 2011).

10. Repeat the process.

Formative assessment is more habitual than occasional in classrooms where maximizing each student’s growth is a central goal. In such classes, it simply makes no sense to teach without a clear understanding of each student’s development along a learning

A classroom is a system with interdependent parts—each affecting the other for better or worse. The learning environment, quality of curriculum, use of formative assessment, instructional planning, and implementation of classroom routines work together to enhance student learning—or, if any of the elements does not function effectively, to impede it. Fruitful use of formative assessment is an essential component in the mix.

By: Mary Charlotte R. Bonus | Teacher II | MNHS-Cabcaben | Mariveles, Bataan