Overview of Formative Assessments

1. Overview of Formative Assessments

2. What is Assessment? The word ‘assess’ comes from the Latin verb ‘assidere’ meaning ‘to sit with’. In assessment one is supposed to sit with the learner. This implies it is something we do ‘with’ and ‘for’ students and not ‘to’ students (Green, 1999).

3. Assessment is Inference Making • Teachers use assessment information and results to reach instructional decisions • The purpose of the formative assessment is to evaluate your students’ understanding of the power standards • What kind of assessment will provide the best evidence as to whether students have met this singular purpose.

4. How will we know if they learned it? The power of common assessments: Schools with the greatest improvements in student achievement consistently used common assessments. D Reeves What are common assessments? Not standardized tests, but rather teacher created, teacher owned assessments that are collaboratively scored and that provide immediate feedback to students and teachers. D Reeves

5. Formative Assessment • Assessment for learning • Taken at varying intervals throughout a course to provide information and feedback that will help improve • the quality of student learning • the quality of the course itself

6. “…learner-centered, teacher-directed, mutually beneficial, formative, context-specific, ongoing, and firmly rooted in good practice" (Angelo and Cross, 1993). • Provides information on what an individual student needs • To practice • To have re-taught • To learn next

7. Key Elements of Formative Assessment • The identification by teachers & learners of learning goals, intentions or outcomes and criteria for achieving these. • Rich conversations between teachers & students that continually build and go deeper. • The provision of effective, timely feedback to enable students to advance their learning. • The active involvement of students in their own learning. • Teachers responding to identified learning needs and strengths by modifying their teaching approach(es). Black & Wiliam, 1998

8. Formative Assessment Research • Research suggests that if done well, genuine “assessments for learning” can produce among the largest achievement gains ever reported for educational interventions.Education Week May 2, 2007 p.22 • In other words, formative assessment, effectively implemented, can do as much or more to improve student achievement than any type of the most powerful instructional interventions (such as) intensive reading instruction, one on one tutoring and the like.L Darling-Hammond and J Branford, Preparing Teachers for a Changing World, 2005, p277.

9. Formative Assessment Research • In reviewing 250 studies from around the world, published between 1987 and 1998, we found that a focus by teachers on assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment of learning, produced a substantial increase in students’ achievement. Black and Wiliam, Assessment and Classroom Learning, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy, and Practice. 1998, pp 7-73

10. Formative Assessment Research • Reviews of research in this area by Natriello (1987) and Crooks ( 1988) were updated by Black and Wiliam (1998)who concluded that regular use of classroom formative assessment would raise student achievement by 0.4 to 0.7 standard deviations – enough to raise the United States to the top five in international rankings. Wiliam, content Then Process: Teaching Learning communities in the Service of Formative Assessment, Unpublished Manuscript, 2007

11. Summative Assessment • Assessment oflearning • Generally taken by students at the end of a unit or semester to demonstrate the "sum" of what they have or have not learned. • Summative assessment methods are the most traditional way of evaluating student work. • "Good summative assessments--tests and other graded evaluations--must be demonstrably reliable, valid, and free of bias" (Angelo and Cross, 1993).

12. Formative ‘… often means no more than that the assessment is carried out frequently and is planned at the same time as teaching.’ (Black and Wiliam, 1999) ‘… provides feedback which leads to students recognizing the (learning) gap and closing it … it is forward looking …’ (Harlen, 1998) ‘ … includes both feedback and self-monitoring.’ (Sadler, 1989) ‘… is used essentially to feed back into the teaching and learning process.’ (Tunstall and Gipps, 1996) Summative ‘…assessment (that) has increasingly been used to sum up learning…’(Black and Wiliam, 1999) ‘… looks at past achievements … adds procedures or tests to existing work ... involves only marking and feedback grades to student … is separated from teaching … is carried out at intervals when achievement has to be summarized and reported.’ (Harlen, 1998)

13. Value of Pre-Assessment ,a common form of formative assessment • Pre-assessments decide where to aim early instruction • Pre-assessments indicate what sorts of skills, knowledge, or attitudes student have or do not have • Pre-assessments determine enabling sub skills necessary for the unit

14. Design matching Assessments • A pretest/post-test design provides a matching set of bookend assessments that are either the same or alternate forms of the same assessment • The improvement between the pre and post assessment constitutes credible evidence of learning • Note : Pre tests are formative, but not the only form of formative assessment that is used on a regular basis.