Our students are all one-of-a-kind. They need unique assessment processes that are relevant to instruction in the modern digital age. For the diverse and creative bunch of kids in our classrooms today, formative assessment fits the bill like no other.
With that in mind, here's the only formative assessment tip guide you need as a teacher. In this post you'll get indispensable formative assessment tips to help you make the most of it in any classroom.
All the information you'll find here goes hand in hand with our bestselling book Mindful Assessment. Formative assessment is powerful and revealing, leading to self-discovery and fostering transformational lifelong learning.
Teachers do nothing without purpose. That purpose is primarily to help their students experience the most relevant and useful learning possible. According to author and educator Andrew Churches, we assess our students for these five fundamental reasons:
Formative assessment is assessment as learning, as opposed to being assessment of learning. It's about looking backward and forward, as well as feeding back and forward as learning happens. It considers where our students are and where they want to be, and helps them get there.
Ultimately, formative assessment shapes both the direction and the development of a learner.
The following chart appears in our book Mindful Assessment. It provides a brief snapshot of the assessments that are most common in education along with their objectives.
There are some unique characteristics that define truly effective formative assessment. Let's have a look at them below.
When using formative assessment to connect with students, we must make the information we give them quick and easy to understand. Students have busy minds just like teachers do, so it helps if our assessments are easily digestible while still being meaningful. In addition, it should be able to connect with them on a level they can relate to.
Formative assessment is assessment as learning. It's about looking backward and forward, as well as feeding back and forward.
Each assessment we give students must be aimed towards helping them gain awareness and understanding of their own thought processes. This means naturally developing their inherent independent thinking skills. If they are able to answer the following questions, you're on the right track with formative assessment:
Another useful framework to consider is used by Australian educators in their own formative assessment. Part of their focus is placed on enabling students to respond to these 3 key questions:
Be sure to choose assessments that are appropriate for both the content you're teaching and the skills you are measuring. In addition, make sure that every question is tied to an essential learning objective.
Our formative assessment tip guide includes a focus on HOTS (higher-order thinking skills). For example, examinations can certainly measure a students' literacy and fluency with writing. Unfortunately, many examinations we give still only test lower-order thinking skills such as memorization and comprehension.
Formative assessment should always include these skills with higher thinking skills like analysis, evaluation, and creation.
What makes formative assessment so special is that it's built on trust. Part of this trust is actually including our students in the assessment process, rather than assessing from a distance as we have done traditionally. Both teacher and student share the learning journey and the objectives.
Transparency is an unspoken pact between teacher and student. We are essentially entering into a learning partnership with every student we teach. The partnerships that succeed are the partnerships that share.
It is crucial that our students know what they are being assessed on and what the expected learning outcomes and goals are. How can we simply hand back an assignment with a pass or fail without explaining what these grades actually mean, and more importantly, suggesting how they can be improved?
Our students can benefit from becoming directly involved in the assessments that we design for them. It connects them with a deeper sense of their progress and a higher purpose for learning. This is because giving students a chance to have input in their own assessment cultivates ownership of learning.
Feedback is an essential element in our formative assessment tip guide. Great feedback can push our students to excel in ways they didn't know they could. There are some guidelines here for giving proper feedback during formative assessments of any kind. Employ these and you can't go wrong.
What makes formative assessment so special is that it's built on trust, part of which is including our students in the assessment process.
You might also benefit from a look at Dr. Jodie Nyquist's feedback model for higher education (2003), a summary of which appears below. Even though it's for higher ed, it matches quite well with every educational level.
This is the weakest form of feedback in which students are simply made aware of their result. It gives them no idea of how to improve on it, or where they went wrong. For example, with final examinations, a student receives a grade but has no opportunity or background to use it as a springboard for further learning and development.
Now the learner can compare their answers and the correct ones. That said, there is still no explanation of why their answers are right or wrong, and no chance to improve their performance. Simply reading out the correct answers isn't really helpful, but it's a step up from just giving the student a grade and leaving it at that.
Now we're getting somewhere. If a teacher provides an explanation of the difference between a student's results and the correct answers, this is the start of much more powerful feedback. The learner can begin to understand and clarify the differences between what they achieved and what the expectations were.
This next stage is even more actionable than the last. The student knows their results and the correct answer. They received an explanation of the differences between the two. Best of all, we've now given them ideas for specific actions that they can take to improve their performance.
The student is provided with KCR+e, specific steps that reduce the gap, and an activity that reinforces the processes, skills, concepts, or learning. Because of this, the student and teacher grow together—job well done.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Originally published Nov 19, 2019, updated September 21, 2021