EDU 403

TESTING AND
EVALUATION
 FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
▪ Planning Assessment and Formative
Assessment

▪ Informal Assessment Tasks During

Instruction

▪ Formal Formative Assessment

Activities
Formative Assessment
Planning Assessment vs Formative
Assessment?
 Thinking About Teaching
▪ Planning assessments vs Formative assessment
▪ Planning assessments are developed during quiet time, when the
teacher can reflect on what students seem to know and be able to
do and then identify appropriate objectives, content topics, and
assessment activities.
▪ Formative assessments take place while interacting with students
and are focused on making quick and specific decisions about what
to do next in order to help students learn.
▪ Formative assessment can take many forms, but they all rely on
information collected through either structured formal activities or
informal observations.
▪ Formal information is collected through preplanned questions and
activities that are presented during instruction to help a teacher
gauge students’ current understanding.
▪ Informal information is gathered through less direct evidence such
as attention, facial expressions, posture, eagerness to participate in
classroom discussions, and questions raised by students.
Formative Assessment
Planning Assessment vs Formative Assessment
 Informal Assessment Tasks During Instruction
▪ Once instruction begins, teachers carry on two tasks:
1. they initiate the instructional activities that they have planned, and
2. they assess the progress and success of these instructional activities in order
to modify them if necessary.
▪ For many reasons, things do not always go as planned.
▪ During instruction, teachers collect informal assessment data to help
monitor factors such as the following:
✓ Interest level of individual students and the class as a whole
✓ Apparent or potential behavior problems
✓ Appropriateness of the instructional technique or activity being used
✓ Which student to call on next
✓ Students who may become off-task
✓ Adequacy of students’ answers
✓ Pace of instruction
✓ Confusion or misconceptions students may be developing
✓ Smoothness of transitions from one concept to another and from one activity
to the next
✓ Suitability of examples used to explain concepts
✓ Degree of comprehension on the part of individual students and the class as
a whole
✓ Desirability of starting or ending a particular activity
▪ If the teacher senses a problem, such as lack of student understanding
or interest, the planned instructional activity should be revised to
alleviate the problem, with another teaching activity or strategy initiated
(path B).
Steps in Instructional Assessment
 Formal Formative Assessment Activities
▪ Research has shown that three forms of formal formative
assessment are particularly effective for helping students learn
(Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, and Wiliam, 2004):
▪ purposeful questioning,
▪ teacher feedback, and
▪ self- and peer assessment.
▪ Effective questioning
▪ Teachers ask many questions of their students during the course of
instruction.
▪ Questions are generally asked for one of two purposes:
1. to maintain student attention or Effective Questioning
2. to collect information about students’ current understanding.
▪ Questions asked to maintain attention are often short ones framed
during teaching that require factual responses by a single student.
▪ However, the questions designed to assess students’ current
understanding are often more open-ended and focus on conceptual
understanding.
▪ When using questions to assess students’ current understanding, it is
also important to obtain answers from multiple students.
Effective Questioning
 Formal Formative Assessment Activities
▪ Feedback to Students
▪ Feedback to students occurs in many ways.
▪ Teachers provide feedback during instruction through their facial
expressions, comments, and reactions to questions students ask and
responses they provide.
▪ More formal feedback often takes the form of grade, scores, and
written comments teachers provide in response to student work.
▪ Research on formative assessment shows that this more formal
feedback can have a powerful effect on student learning.
▪ Regarding grades and scores, the research indicates that such
feedback is viewed as more important by students than the lengthy
comments a teacher may provide.
▪ When providing written comments, it is important to inform students
about both positive aspects of their work and elements that can be
improved.
Feedback to Students
 Formal Formative Assessment Activities
▪ Peer and Self-Assessment
▪ Peer and self-assessment can increase the amount of feedback
students receive.
▪ Peer assessment provides valuable opportunities for students to
learn about their own ideas and the quality of their work by carefully
examining work samples produced by their peers.
▪ To assist students in conducting self- and peer assessments, it is
important for the teacher to make expectations and criteria for
evaluating a performance clear to students.
▪ Developing students’ ability to self-assess their own work can
provide them with the tools to identify strengths and weaknesses in
their work and to identify areas in need of improvement.
▪ Self-assessment can also empower students to determine whether
they have fulfilled the requirements of an assignment.
Peer and Self-assessment