Formative Assessment

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Formative Assessment
Margaret Heritage
Iowa High School Summit December 9, 2008 Des
Moines, Iowa
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Overview

• What is Formative Assessment?
• Key Features of Formative Assessment
• The Process of Formative Assessment

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A Professional Culture

• Leadership
• Collaboration
• Respect
• Transparency
• Risk taking
• Willingness to change
• Commitment of time and effort
• Reflection

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Creating a Classroom Culture for Formative
Assessment
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Write 3 Things You Would Include in Each Circle

Learning Culture for Formative Assessment
Teacher
Students
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Getting Started - Small Steps
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Learning Goal and Success Criteria

• Learning goal shared with students
• Criteria for success shared with students
• Goal and criteria are manageable
• Goal and criteria are in language students can
  understand
• Criteria made explicit through exemplars

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Strategies to Develop Learning Goals and Success
Criteria

• Department meetings
• ? Pairs review upcoming lessons from Iowa Core
  and determine LGs and SC
• ? Share with colleagues for feedback and decide
  on best SC
• ? Subsequent meeting provide feedback on LG and
  SC from implementation experience
• ? Revise

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Questioning

• More effort has to be spent in framing
  questions that are worth askingthat is questions
  which explore issues that are critical to the
  development of students understanding.

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Questioning

• Department meetings to agree on
• What are the important questions in this
  unit/topic that will scaffold learning?
• How will these questions increase in challenge?
• What kind of thinking will be revealed by these
  questions?
• Trial and revise

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Improving Questions (Tuffin, 2003)

• Which word is used to describe energy types such
  as elastic, chemical and gravitational?
• What is a good characterization?
• Which of these two questions do you consider to
  be the better one?

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Improving Questions (Tuffin, 2003)

• Which word is used to describe energy types such
  as elastic, chemical and gravitational?
• Why is the word potential used to describe
  energy types such as elastic, chemical and
  gravitational energy?

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Improving Questions (Tuffin, 2003)

• What is a good characterization?
• What do we need to consider before deciding how
  to characterize the mother in this novel?

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Improving Questions (Tuffin, 2003)

• Which of these two questions do you consider to
  be the better one?
• Why do you consider one of these questions to be
  better than the other?

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Classroom Strategies for Questioning (Clarke,
2005)

• Increase wait time
• No hands up
• Talking partner discussions
• Students quickly jot down thoughts

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Interpreting Evidence

• Sharing evidence
• Discussing interpretations against success
  criteria

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School Feedback Policy

• Provides consistency across school
• Legitimates value of oral feedback
• Removes teacher guilt about not marking and
  grading every piece of work
• Enables feedback about successes and improvements
• Provides clarity about when to give grades

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Developing Skills in Giving Feedback

• Review same piece of work, give feedback and
  discuss
• Paired in class observations
• Examine written feedback against success criteria
• Review student improvement efforts as a result of
  feedback
• Share examples of comment marker (success and
  improvement)
• Ask students opinions about the value of the
  feedback

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Marking Techniques for Formative Assessment

• Range marking
• Sample marking
• Comment marker marking (successes/improvements)
• Acknowledgement marking
• In-depth selected items marking
• Marking together
• Self- and peer-marking

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Involving Students Peer- and self- assessment

• Students need to be trained
• Ground rules about peer-assessment
• Success criteria are the focus of assessment

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Involving Students

• Provide ground rules
• Introduce in stages
• Whole class feedback on exemplars
• Students identify own success and improvement
  opportunities
• Teacher modeling
• Templates for scaffolding peer-assessment
• Practice

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Ground rules

• Write down three ground rules you think are
  important to establish for peer-assessment

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Getting Started - Small Steps
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Margaret Heritage mheritag_at_ucla.edu