Educating The Gifted Through Ability

Formative assessment-Teachers that collect evidence about what a student still needs to comprehend and adaptions that are made to meet the student’s needs.

Formative assessments are non-graded, during instruction, checks for understanding. Effective formative assessments are part of a planned process of instruction that regularly monitors student comprehension and understanding. For the unit you are fully developing, please include a minimum

The purpose of the evaluation process is to determine whether the program objectives are being accomplished, to provide data for program development, and to ascertain whether the program has affected the student progress. Through the evaluation process in this gifted plan, formative and summative are to be used to gather data. Formative assessment is the process of collecting information about the programs while it is in progress in order to make better developments. Summative assessment is the process of making judgments about all the components of the program (Purcell, Eckert, & National Association for Gifted Children (U.S.), 2006).

There are many myths surrounding the education of gifted students. According to Cross (2002), some of these myths include: gifted students should spend time with their age peers, gifted students should be well rounded, giftedness is a natural occurrence, professionals who work with gifted students understand the their social and emotional needs, adults truly understand what it is like to be gifted in today’s society, messages about being too smart, and the age old statement that all students are gifted. While these myths are prevalent in education, they are myths and we need to be enlightened and dispel these myths.

It comes as no surprise that our gifted and talented education program is growing in the United States as we are recognizing more students who need a higher level of academic content than the grade level they currently reside. According to a policy brief compiled by Rachana Bhatt (2011); the percent of students in the United States in the gifted and talented (G&T) education program has grown from 6.3% in 2000 to 6.7% in 2006 (A Review of Gifted and Talented Education in the United States, 2011). What seems to be lacking however, is the array of diversity found in our general education classrooms into our G&T programs. Within a nation that strives to provide an

Carol Ann Tomlinson’s article, “The Bridge Between Today’s Lessons and Tomorrow”, discusses formative assessments and the role they play in todays classrooms. In many classrooms across America formative assessments are used to raise test scores, rather than as a tool to create open communication between students and teachers. Tomlinson offers educators 10 principles to use and apply formative assessment practices. I believe these principles can be used to increase teacher efficacy with assessment and to increase the communication between teachers and students.

This teacher friendly book focuses on what types of information common formative assessments can provide and how these assessments can provide timely data to help differentiate instruction (Ainsworth and Viegut, 5). What made this resource different was its “team” approach to assessment, which ties in nicely to my districts policies on assessment. The authors stress the importance of using data teams made up of professional learning communities, usually departments to create specifically designed assessments that address the same content by standard. The book also provided a very helpful revised instruction assessment model with data analysis which showed the steps of pre-assessment, analysis of results, differentiating instruction, teaching, monitoring, reflecting and adjusting, re-teaching and finally post assessment (Ainsworth & Viegut,

Is ability grouping (or tracking) an efficient way to handle differences in student abilities? Does such grouping benefit students---or does it unfairly label them? Research, logic, and emotion often clash when

In recent years, gifted education programs have received extensive attention from a multitude of groups, in many cases arousing passionate arguments about their effectiveness, or even their fundamentality. Angry parents complain about budget cuts from these programs, while others are furious that their child was not accepted into a gifted program. Teachers are also divided on this issue. Some teachers believe gifted programs are very important for engaging high-achieving students, while others believe they hold back students who are not accepted. Still others have too little knowledge of the issue to create an informed opinion, even though it directly relates to their work. Many do not know how to identify gifted students so they can recommend

Ms. Jones assumed her students understood the content when in reality students did not understand the crucial ideas. Ms. Jones would have realized her students were not learning the intended learning if she would have paused to conduct formative assessments throughout the unit instruction. Once, Ms. Jones decided to include target-learning goals, allowing her to monitor students’ learning progress and implement remediation immediately. The most effective classrooms provide students will multiple learning opportunities. The teacher needs to assess their students often through formative assessments to ensure their students are learning the crucial information provided throughout the instructional strategies. Formative assessments allow teachers to adjust their instructional strategies based on students’ results from the formative assessments before students engage in the unit’s summative

Ability grouping can help students excel in their academic studies. Students may feel rushed and then they will not be able to fully understand the concept they were taught, or students will feel as if they are waiting forever to move on to a new concept. An example of this is, “Children may be assigned to different groups for reading and math, and can switch groups if they have shown progress, struggle to get along with other students in a group or need extra help with a particular lesson” (Yee). Being put into one group doesn’t mean the students can not move into the other

Knowing when to use each is imperative to the success of students. It is the teacher's job to decide when to use each of the types and subtypes of assessments. Through the research presented in this literature it has been found that formative assessment is a more helpful form of guiding instruction. Summative assessment is used to see what students know about a particular topic at a particular time, such as a cumulative exam. Students and teachers alike feel the pressure that high stakes testing can bring. Teachers make all the difference when it comes to testing. So, in order for teachers to have classrooms where testing is used efficiently they must work diligently to make sure their assessments are balanced and carefully

In the classroom we assess formally through assignments, tests, quizzes, performances, projects, and surveys; or informally through questioning and dialogue, observing, and anecdotal note taking. In any of these instances, we may or may not be engaged in formative assessment: the determining factor is not the type of assessment we use, but rather how we and our students use the information.

Maria and Pavlou (2008) in their study showed that mixed-ability classes provided students access to more learning opportunities. Johnson and Johnson (1987) recommended that assigning students of different abilities in the same group could maximize the strength of each group. Such ability variety within the same group creates an effective learning environment and provides learning opportunities for low-level students as well as opportunities to more advance students. For instance, when learners with learning problem are grouped with highly

The main aim of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing information that will be useful for instructors to improve their teaching, and also or students to enhance their