Evaluate The Benefits Of Formative Assessment

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.

The article Formative and Summative Assessment in the classroom has several of strategies to guide teachers to assess the students learning more effectively. Although their strategies method associated with the instructional phase of a lesson, there are also important to teach students so they could become independent. For instance, the author mentions, “Self and peer assessment” not only does it encourage students to be

The term ‘formative assessment’ is used to describe the activities and processes used by teachers and learners to gather information that informs future teaching and learning. Assessment becomes formative if the information gathered is used as feedback to adapt and modify teaching and learning (Black and Wiliam, 1998, p.2). There are a variety of different methods and techniques that can be used by teachers and learners that can contribute to enhancing learner progress. These include

Formative assessment, or assessment for learning as it is often called, is the assessment that

A formative assessment provides informal feedback and information during the teaching process. This assessment measures student progress and performance thus allowing further improvement and development. It can also assess the teacher’s progress as an instructor, enabling the teacher to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching methods.

Formative assessment can be an effective tool in building positive relationships as it gives cause for two-way communication at any point of a learning course. It can be written or verbally delivered, offering the opportunity to appeal to a variety of learning styles. It enables the learner to influence their learner programme and helps them build essential life-skills such as goal setting and self assessment. Its main disadvantage for the trainer is the amount of time the type of assessment can consume, and a learner may become disengaged by repetitive assessment exercises that interrupt the flow of learning.

Coffey, J. E., Hammer, D., Levin, D. E & Grant, T. (2011). The Missing Disciplinary Substance of Formative Assessment. Journal of research in science teaching. 48 (10) PP. 1109–1136 (2011) College of Education, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 2 Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 3 St. Paul School, Baltimore, Maryland Received 17 April 2011; Accepted 5 August 2011. Retrieved from file:///Users/EleanorNewbold/Downloads/Coffey_et_al-2011-Journal_of_Research_in_Science_Teaching.pdf

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.

The first article that I viewed was on Edutopia and it was titled Why Formative Assessments Matter. This article was a very helpful in that it was a review of what formative assessments are, why they are used, and when and how you use them. The middle part, why they are used, it reinforces that they are used for, to inform, not to punish. This is important to remember as we are assessing and planning instruction for students each day. Learning and showing what you have learned should never feel like a punishment. At the end of the article, in the last section, there were suggestions on ways to formatively assess students in a way that would not feel as though they are being punished. Instead, they are enjoying showing what they have learned. The last tip in this article was to watch, look, and listen. It is important to remember that to formatively assess students you must constantly

Assessment for learning is any assessment for which the first priority in its design and practice is to serve the purpose of promoting further student learning and enabling improved student learning through purposeful interaction and providing meaningful feedback. Formative assessment is specifically intended to generate feedback and feed forward on performance to improve, accelerate and enable learning (Sadler, 1998). Formative assessment can and should occur throughout a daily class, through implementation of learning and teaching strategies that lead to both oral and written feedback. The Formative assessment approach is equitable and reliable, producing some significant indicator of student developed understanding that links directly to the syllabus outcomes. This then allows the teacher or other students to respond by trying to

Recently, whenever I hear current teachers discussing about assessing students, ‘Formative Assessment’ is sure to be highlighted. Nowadays this method (formative assessment) is becoming popular among schools and is being applied widely in schools including my own school. Loughland and Kilpatrick (2015) identified in the few past decades, formative assessment has turned out to be the main goal for teachers and educational systems. On the foundation of Loughland and Kilpatrick (2015) findings and from my experience in the field of teaching, I found out nowadays teachers and school stakeholders strongly feel that formative assessment is the best method to assess in order to enhance students’ learning. For these evident reasons, I am interested in finding

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.

Within my past and current educational course work and field experiences, I have explored and engaged in the use of multiple assessments to gather both formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments are for learning, they assess during learning. Summative assessments are of learning they assess what students ability to apply what they have learned. Formative assessments can be described as check points done frequently through a lesson to assess student acquisition of knowledge. Summative assessments assess student ability to apply what they have learned.

To successfully conduct this type of instructional practices of assessing students daily the teacher or planning committee must plan for these assessments that link with the learning of all students (Fennell, Swartz, McCord, & Wray, 2015). There has been a disconnection of what is expected of the instructional staff in order to accomplish success. According to Fennell, Swartz, McCord, & Wray (2015), there is little to no research of how to conduct formative assessment as an instructional tool and for that reason (Schneider and Meyer’s 2012), believes that teacher are not adequately re-teaching or providing intervention which is hindering students success rates.

Students may not take it as seriously as summative assessment. It can be a time taking process. Students need different kinds of formative assessment at different stages in their learning.[2]