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Teachers around the U.S. are struggling with just how to create common formative assessments. Of course, it's a lot more complicated than just coming up with a little quiz or thinking up an exit ticket at the end of class. A lot of the work deals with meetings within our department. We get together to discuss the scope and sequence of what we teach. Then we have to generate the actual assessment.
Once the assessment is deployed, of course it has to be analysed. We once again have to get together with our department to figure out how our students are doing compared to the students of Mr. Smith down the hall, for example. If my students didn't do as well, I need to figure out what Mr. Smith does better so that my students learn more.
Typically this kind of work leads to improved education. Its extremely valuable. You've got to admit, though- this is a whole lot of work.
Technology can make common formative assessment far easier and often more productive. Let's start by looking at the creation. To make any assessment common requires collaboration on a single file and there are some great online tools to make that happen.
Now that you've all decided on the nature of the assessment, its time to present it to the students. There are several digital tools that can help you with that.
When the data is collected, it's time to get the department together again to go over results. Instead of forcing everyone to gather in the same place at the same time, you could go back to the collaboration tools I mentioned above. These tools make it easy for teachers to add comments next to each question in the assessment noting the percentage of students who got the question right. They could also mention useful strategies for teaching that concept.
If you still want some face to face interaction but your having a hard time getting everyone together in the same place, consider Google Plus. This social network allows you to hold video conferences at the same time you work on a Google doc. So you can see and speak to one another while writing on the same document.
Common formative assessments hold so much power to improve learning. The digital tools I've mentioned here can make the creation, deployment and analysis of those assessments far easier than ever before.
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I'd say that formative assessments should never, ever be graded. Just as you don't penalize a student for "failing" a formative assessment, you wouldn't "reward" them for success. Formative assessments are really about the teacher, not the student. They just guide our instruction.
These are some great tools for creating formative assessments! I've used Google Docs to create pre-assessments of vocabulary words.
We've been having some big discussions around assessment, and what exactly is 'formative' or 'summative' assessment. Assessment is assessment is assessment. What makes it either formative or summative is how/why the data from the assessment is used. I'm actually working facilitating such a discussion with my school's leadership team. I've created this tool to help us get started, I'm thinking of calling it "The Teaching and Learning Mobius."
It makes sens to collaborate with colleagues in order to create assessments of learning targets.... but how do you know before you give that assessment that it will be formative or summative? If a student nails the target on the head in the "formative" assessment, shouldn't they be given the credit for meeting and move on in their learning?
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