High Quality Formative Assessment

1.) What is formative assessment? Assessment that focuses on giving students specific, timely, task-based feedback and comments but does not give students a grade. It focuses on reaching each student individually and not comparing them to a grade scale or other students.

2.) What is the CENTRAL purpose of formative assessment?
Student learning, to have students learn more effectively by receiving crucial and constructive feedback based on their performance or work.

3.) Giving students specific feedback based on their work will help students recognize their effort will directly affect their learning and performace in any subject. This feedback is crucial to get certain students to realize that they are struggling only because of a lack of effort.

4.) These assessments can be done in both ways by giving students the specific feedback and suggestions to improve without a grade on their work, but still give them a grade based on their work and performance.

5.) My classroom has not incorporated any formative assessments. He does give his students proper time to prepare notes and review for their tests during class.

6.) What are some strategies to help formative assessment be more effective when providing students with feedback? Make sure you have students talk to you specificly about the feedback and make sure they understand what they did right and what are the things they can do to improve. Structure assessment in such a way that students understand they are important in the process and the teacher-student relationship should be viewed as teamwork towards effective learning.

7.) Advantages are that it helps improve student motivation, on task behavior, and self awareness. It also helps the teacher identify students who are struggling or have misconceptions about the material causing them to struggle.

8.) What are some challenges to implementing high quality formative assessment?
Education is always looking for concrete ways to assess student performance. Without grades, departments of education, administrators, principals, etc. may feel students will not try or do their work without the motivation of grade.