Serendipity35

As I rehearsed a presentation on rubrics this past weekend for the Faculty Institute this week at NJIT, I reminded myself to stress formative assessment.

Every teacher and student is aware of summative assessment - those things (especially tests) that come at the end of learning experiences. Summative assessments are used to evaluate student learning, skill acquisition, and academic achievement at the conclusion of a some defined instructional period. Typically we use them at the end of a project, unit, course, semester, program, or school year. Formative assessment, including diagnostic testing, is a wide range of formal and informal assessment procedures. Teachers conduct these during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student achievement.

These formative checks are often what lead to "course corrections." The term might be one more often used in navigation, but it applies nicely to teaching. We set out both in a course and on some course of study. We monitor the conditions along the way and then make corrections. If done well, we still arive at the same destination, but in less time or with less wasted effort or with less stormy weather along the way.

Rubrics are a good example of a tool that can be used as a formative or summative assessment, though it is more likely to be used as the latter. That's unfortunate as I find that formative assessments are more important to learning than summative. A lot of research bears this out and shows formative assessment as a viable means to help improve overall student achievement.

In teaching writing, it becomes obvious that the feedback students receive during the writing process is much more useful than comments on a final paper that will no longer be revised. Frequent formative measures of student progress are essential, how the information obtained from these measures is used is even more critical for boosting student achievement.

Most of the research suggests that key elements of the formative assessment process include a) sharing clearly stated learning goals with the students b) provision of specific, actionable feedback so that [teachers/students] can adjust learning strategies.

A more recent trend is to have greater student involvement in that formative assessment process (for example, creating the rubric) and make them take greater ownership of their learning by tracking progress toward their goals, and by self and peer review of their work.