Analyzing The Classroom And Formative Assessment Of Second / Foreign Language Teaching And Learning Written By Ketabi And Ketabi

I believe assessment is important and is the basis of planning for instruction, whether it is diagnostic prior to learning, formative during units or lessons, or summative to evaluate student learning. Rowan’s quote in Every Teacher’s Guide to Assessment, "After all, in the end, the problem is less the idea of testing itself, but how we design them, apply, them, and make use of their data." definitely has an impact on my assessment practices. I feel it is necessary to make sure the student acquires all aspects of the learning. Assessment should be used to bring a value for students. Within my instruction, I implement daily formative assessments which may include turn and share, quick writes, graphic organizers, online discussion responses, KahootIt, and other forms. Designing the appropriate formative assessment to match the lesson is important to assess how the learning is taught and whether the students are showing progress. In addition, I have worked on building blocks of formative assessments in checklist style leading up to the point of reviewing for a summative test. Each of these are checked off as completed and instant feedback is given. Feedback from an assessment is essential to student learning and how a teacher will ensure the content is being acquired.

One form of assessment that we may all be familiar with regardless of our profession is high-stakes testing. This type of assessment provides the public with assurance that students can achieve at a level needed to function in the real world. While there are both pros and cons with any assessment, high-stakes testing should be relied on to enhance instruction and help the students and not to chastise students or schools (Vacca p. 146). Another type of assessment is called formative assessment which can be both formal and informal. These can help document students’ progress along the way and can be beneficial, especially when needing to monitor reading growth. Through formative assessment, the results help to identify the specific learning needs of all readers, as well as those who do not speak English as their first language (Vacca p.

As a Middle School Language Arts teacher, I have found that assessments are a daily part of our job. Everything that my students do in the classroom ultimately ends up being assessed in some sort of way. I must admit that it can at times be overwhelming for assessments to be such a huge part of our curriculum; I understand the necessity of each one. I haven’t always been focused as intently on assessments. I really didn’t consider the importance of assessments as much. As I gained experience and knowledge I realized that assessing my students provides me with information that makes my job more successful. I believe to effectively teach my students, I must understand and implement the right assessments properly. My assessment philosophy is that to be able to ensure our students are learning and that we are teaching the right way we must include proper assessment for validation. With that being said it is very important to use different forms of assessments to gauge student performance. One of the outstanding features of studies of assessment in recent years has been the shift in the focus of attention, towards greater interest In the interactions between assessment and classroom learning and away from concentration on the properties of restricted forms of test which are only weakly linked to the learning experiences of students (Black 2015) This research supports the idea that assessments

However, the teacher will use these assessments to accurately predicted students learning and provide the learner with active and regular descriptive feedback that will improve their learning (Huinker and Freckmann, 2009). There are two types of formative assessments: formal and informal. Both formative assessments involve collating, performing, and understanding information. Informal assessments are designed to gain evidence of students learning, however they are more learner-friendly, such as a discussion, quizzes or game. Formal assessments are also designed to gain evidence of students learning, however they are curriculum based assessment that share a connection with a summative approach (Ruiz-Primo and Furtak, 2004). Formal assessments are given, with notice less frequently, whereas informal assessments can be given without warning. Formal assessments are often used as a final check –up, to be certain that the learners have absorbed all the information and are ready to move on to the next topic that will be taught (NSTA,

This excerpt indicates that the teacher believes that proper implementation of assessment is vital to be done by the teacher because it helps the teacher understands the students’ learning progress. Knowing the students’ progress is essential in making decision whether remedial or modification of teaching strategy should be done by the teachers. This indicates that the teacher aware of formative assessment purposes in which to change the teachers’ teaching practices to help the students gaining the learning goals quicker in a shorter learning time.

This article attempts to compile teachers' opinions and self-perceptions of various classroom assessment techniques. Research shows that formative assessments consistently show improvement in student learning and achievement, and that formative assessments are the most effective techniques in reducing the achievement gap between higher performing and lower performing students. This article describes how elementary and secondary teachers in Ontario, Canada perceive different assessment techniques, and how they incorporate formative assessments into their classroom (Volante & Beckett, 2011).

Formal vs. informal, formative vs. summative, these are different types of assessment. In the field of education, an assessment refers to “the wide variety of methods that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document the academic readiness, learning progress, and skill acquisition of students from

Ultimately, they have to rethink assessment from the ground up as a coherent system, in which formative assessment is a critical part, but not the only critical part, well-designed and implemented formative assessment should be able to suggest how instruction should be modified, as well as suggest impressionistically to the teacher what students know and can do. Thus, teachers should be able to design assessment systems in which formative assessments routinely add to the teacher’s overall informal judgments of student

Students will be assessed by a teacher centered informal questioning period prior to each day’s lesson to observe their grasp of the content materials of the prior lesson. Teacher will also use journal entries and exit slips as formative assessments as well.

Assessing young children as they move through the steps of their literacy development will help teachers plan for their lessons with a greater outcome for success. Using both formal and informal assessments they can establish the child’s strengths and weaknesses as well as monitor their progress and growth. Assessments can be formative or summative depending on when the assessment takes place. Formative assessments can be administered regularly throughout the school year and assist teachers in monitoring the students’ learning progress. Where as summative assessments measure what the students’ have learned at the end of any selected event. According to Copple & Bredekamp, (2009) “Assessment focuses on children’s progress towards goals that are developmentally and educationally significant” (p. 22). Additionally, assessments can provide the teacher with the

Assessment for Learning is defined as “the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there.” (Assessment Reform Group, 1999). A key starting point for this piece of work was ‘Science Inside the Black Box’ (Black and Harrison, 2004, p1) which was written to ”offer advice to teachers on how to interact more effectively with students, on a day-to-day basis, promoting their learning”. They explain that ”formative assessment has both generic features, i.e. features which will apply to learning across all stages and all school subjects, and features which are specific, for example to primary teachers and to individual subjects” (p2).

Assessments are tools used to gather data. Effective classroom teachers use assessment tools to gather data not only about how their students are learning, but also to monitor their own teaching. Two types of commonly used assessments are formative and summative. Each one is important, but it is important to note that one significantly affects the results of the other. “Formative assessment is the process of gathering evidence of student learning, providing feedback to students, and adjusting instructional strategies to enhance achievement” (McMillan, 2014, p. 93). From this definition, the purpose of formative assessments is to monitor student learning and is often referred to as an

Formative assessment is rather a practice where the teacher is able to give feedback for improvements and simultaneously allows the students to develop the ‘revision culture’. By getting feedbacks form the teachers, students are able to identify their weaknesses and strengths. Moreover, they develop the culture of how to learn for a specific objective. Also, the teachers identify the topics where their students are struggling and plan their lesson according to the needs of their

There are two forms of assessment; formative and summative. Formative assessments are carried out as the course progresses. These are an informal and simple way of gauging how and what your students are learning. This then allows teachers to amend their teaching

Informal assessment allows students to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways which can benefit all students. It can include group or individual projects, presentations, essays, experiments, or demonstrations. Each of these can allow for “knowledge that transfers from one situation to another [which] is based on students’ abilities to understand central principles, see connections and make distinctions, and be strategic in attacking problems and analyzing information” (Darling-Hammond, p. 285). A variety of assessment methods allow for this to happen and for students to use their personal strengths to demonstrate understanding of the information. “Research into students’ preferences for alternative assessments shows that the assessments that have been positively evaluated by students were more authentic and thus made learning more realistic and powerful” (as cited in Brown, Irving, Peterson, and Hirschfeld, 2009, p. 99). Students should be able to think creatively and take hold of their own education and learning because they must ideally be prepared for a rapidly changing society where they must be able to adapt and formulate their own solutions. Teachers are able to provide feedback to the children so they know what was done effectively and what needs to be modified. Rather than teachers pressuring students to show understanding through a single examination, they will have opportunities to confidently demonstrate knowledge with less