Monday, July 20, 2015

Is Your Formative Assessment Really Formative? I've Been Thinking...



Lately I seem to be sticking my nose into conversations around assessment, and more specifically formative assessment.  These include apps or websites or favourite activities such as exit tickets or creating screencasts. My hope is that the ideas about "formative assessment" being shared by fellow educators are ways that their students are showing what they know.  But here's the thing, it seems that these conversations rarely seem to go beyond the tools students are using to share their learning.  Isn't formative assessment, or assessment for learning, way more than just seeing what a student knows, AND actually taking that knowledge and creating an action plan to help push the learning forward?

I wonder sometimes if people are so wrapped up in the tools to collect student knowledge, that they forget one of the most important reasons why this knowledge is being collected in the first place.  With formative assessment in mind, aren't we collecting our students thinking so we can help guide/support/facilitate  the nexts steps  to move their learning forward? Sometimes those next steps come from the student themselves through their personal reflection.  Sometimes those next steps come from their classmates during peer assessment. Sometimes those next steps come from the teacher. Sometimes those next steps might come from all three sources.  But isn't  the main point of formative assessment to see what a student knows and where they could/should go next?  The where to next is a key element to formative assessment and in my opinion the biggest difference between formative and summative assessment.

Maybe I'm way off base here around formative assessment.  Maybe I'm not acknowledging the growth that has occurred during a lesson or a unit or a school term. Maybe I'm missing the celebration of learning that has happened between the beginning of a unit and the end of it. In no way do I want to devalue that.  That is also a key factor in why we assess work but I think that falls under the "summative" form of assessment.  But if we are just looking at what we've achieved, and we aren't looking for or suggesting next steps then our assessment isn't formative anymore.  In my mind the purpose of formative assessment is to review knowledge and help guide/support/facilitate next steps

How are you supporting formative assessment  practices in your teaching environment? Are you just discussing tools, or are you discussing what you are learning from what your students are sharing via those tools and how you can help support and push learning forward.  Now that's something I'd love to talk more about.



4 comments:

  1. Great points Karen. I find the best are with reflections and then the conversations with the kids. They see the growth much faster too when they are more in charge of understanding and owning their next steps than by me, as their teacher, simply telling them what their next steps should be.

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    1. I couldn't agree more that students grow much faster when they are in charge of understanding and owning their next steps. Far too often teachers control far too much of the learning environment to the point where it doesn't belong to the student at all. As Shelley mentions below, it's important to keep the learning intentions in mind and so whether it's the student, a peer, or the teacher, this should remain as the focus to move learning forward. What do you think?

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  2. Hi Karen. For me it all starts and comes back to our learning intentions. Some are simple and easy to achieve and others are more complex and require us to break up the tasks into smaller learning bytes to scaffold the learning. An example: Learning to use a 3D printer. I will need multiple opportunities (rtial and error) to learn the basics of the printer before I begin incorporating more complex design principles. I can hardly wait!!!

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    1. Yes, yes, yes! We need to know what we are suppose to be learning - ie the learning intention, how we know when we are there ( meeting the criteria), and what steps we can take to get there. If you're trying to create with a 3D printer, and nothing is printing from your printer we'll take that knowledge to figure out where we've gone wrong, and what we can do to move our learning forward. ;-) Excited to be on THAT learning journey with you. I'm also glad that we won't stop trying to create a 3D print because it didn't work the first time. Our results will help inform our next steps! (Lisa!!!) :-)

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