Fostering High Quality Formative Assessment: A Policy Brief by The National Council of Teachers for English

In a blog posting answer the following questions:

What is formative assessment?

Formative assessment is an assessment FOR learning that is beneficial to a student. Formative assessment utilizes immediate and high quality feed back as the means for improving student understanding. The task may or may not be a graded assignment.

What is the CENTRAL purpose of formative assessment?

Student learning.

Connect a best practice in formative assessment to one research-based strategy.

Providing Feedback

Give an example of how a specific assessment can be used formatively and summatively.

One way to make an assessment both formative and summative is by providing student's a rubric with their project. For example, I recently gave students a week to make a model of an atom for an element of their choice. This project allowed me to provide the students with a formative assessment by immediately telling them the parts of the atom that they ignored or had a misconception about. By giving the students a rubric that detailed what items I was looking for in the project, enabled me to give the students a grade for the project. This aspect helped to make the project a summative assessment.

Give an example from your field placement related to formative assessment and timing.

By implementing an intermittent schedule for quizzing last week, I surprised my students with a pop quiz that required them to have read the assigned sections from their textbook. Many of the students realized as a result of the quiz that they were not prepared for the future chapter test. By quickly returning the students' quizzes with feedback, I helped them narrow down which topics they needed to spend more time studying for the chapter test.

What are some strategies to help formative assessment be more effective when providing students with feedback?

From the text:

High-quality formative assessment takes many forms, but it 

always:

 emphasizes the quality rather than the quantity of 

student work; 

 prizes giving advice and guidance over giving grades; 

 avoids comparing students in favor of enabling individual students to assess their own learning; 

 fosters dialogues that explore understandings rather 

than lectures that present information; 

 encourages multiple iterations of an assessment cycle, 

each focused on a few issues; 

 provides feedback that engender

Name two advantages to high quality formative assessment.

1- "It helps  identify students who are struggling with particular tasks or operating under misconceptions.  This, in turn, can lead to improved instruction that addresses student learning."

2- "For students, formative assessment offers increased feelings of confidence and control.  Students who experience high-quality formative assessment are more likely to transfer learning from one class to another because they understand the given area thoroughly and can relate new learning to what they already know." 

What are some challenges to implementing high quality formative assessment?

One of the challenges mentioned in the reading is that teachers have to work within policy in order to effectively be active with formative assessment. To the community and parents, formative assessment could make teachers look as if they are not doing their job by "shirking responsibilities".