Deepened understanding of Formative Assessment

Formative Assessment Revisited

Today's exercise asked you to apply the Backward Design framework to create a unit on formative assessment.  How, if at all, did this activity change and/or deepen your understanding of formative assessment?  How would you describe to one of your science colleagues what the most salient features of formative assessment are? 

My group members, Alberto, Carrie, and I had a very easy time with this assignment.  While it is supposed to take approximately 3 hours, with three of us, 50 minutes was almost enough time to pour our ideas into one solid "backwards design" template.  We utilized the information that we read in the Wiggins and McTighe chapter about backwards design to create a thoughtful unit on assessment.  We first started filling out the learning goals.  We asked ourselves, "What do we want our students to know or be aware of as a result of our teaching this unit?"  After we had formalized four learning goals, we decided next to ask ourselves, "What evidence are we going to need in order to fully know that our students have grasped hold of the different types of assessment?"  We decided that we needed to figure out student outcomes, if we were going to have any evidence of their learning, and start thinking about the different ways we could assess this understanding of assessment.  Next, we asked ourselves, "How are we going to teach them?"  "What learning experiences are we going to incorporate within our curriculum in order to provide the students with an opportunity to get used to this material?"   We figured out 2 or 3 days worth of activities, discussions, and pre/post questions in order to identify misconceptions.  Lastly, we asked ourselves, "Based on what we have provided for them, will they acquire the desired learning outcomes?  How can we test this?"  We began talking about assessments, and ended up creating groups to do a short presentation on assessment, while receiving verbal feedback, written feedback, and a rubric describing how the presentation should be laid out from the instructor.  We also talked about the importance of elucidating anything erroneous that we, as the teachers, heard during the presentations.  Odds are, if one student was confused on a subject, other students would be as well.  Addressing the entire class immediately can prevent the spread of the false information, which is yet another example of formative assessment.  After this assignment, I do feel that I have a deeper understanding of assessment, but more so backwards design, and the process that goes into creating a lesson plan.  All of the assessment information was in the reading and we just had to pull it out where necessary.  Actually creating the lesson plan involved more thought.

For the second part of the question, I think I would start by educating my colleague about what the differences between formative and summative assessment tend to be.  I would begin by elucidating to my colleague that summative assessment is more thorough, detailed, analyzed, and extensively reproduced, much like the scientific research we produce within the department.  Summative assessment is in a somewhat standardized format and can make comparisons between schools and individual students.  However, formative assessment is much different.  It is exploratory, preliminary, and instructive for future experiments.  It is a key tool to connect learning and teaching and it can happen at any time within a classroom.  I would explain that formative assessment is responsive and ongoing.  I would emphasize that it is informal and interactive with the students.  It is a bit carefree in that it can be unplanned, and one on one or with the entire class.  Formative assessment can be "implied' and can be done by both students and teachers.  I would encourage this colleague to give it a try and see how his or her class responds.