The formative performance tasks are the exercises that students complete as they are building their knowledge and practicing with inquiry and disciplinary skills. These tasks are the things they will actually do in the inquiry to get to the point that they can make an argument. Formative performance task connect directly to supporting questions and enable students to work with sources. They are in fact he directions for how students should use the sources to develop their knowledge. Returning to the Uncle Tom's Cabin inquiry, the first formative performance tasks is for students to "Write a summary of the plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that includes main ideas and supporting details from Stowe’s description of slavery in the book." You will recall that the sources students will use include a summary of the book as well as text excerpts, and illustrations from the book.

Hopefully you are now picking up on this a design process. You have developed a supporting question. You have some sources that reflect the content of those questions. Now, you design some formative performance tasks where students do something with the sources to answer the supporting question.

Why do we call it a formative performance task?

Glad you asked:) It reflects a really important aspect of IDM in that IDM is an instructional assessment system. The overall design of the blueprint establishing a framework for assessing students' learning through formative and summative performance tasks. The formative tasks are the exercises that students complete along the way top the summative argument task. The nature of formative work is that the teacher provides feedback to students on their progress. That's a critically important aspect to implementing an inquiry. We'll talk more about implementation in the final part of this module. For now, we need to put a plan in place to enable formative feedback. That will be your design challenge.

Some design considerations

As you develop your formative performance tasks, it's important to keep a few things in mind.

1. Formative tasks should be contained , fairly brief in duration, and not too elaborate. Keep in mind the total amount of time you have allocated to this inquiry. Let's say you want students to spend 3 hours total on the inquiry (that's a common time frame for IDM). In that context, each formative performance task should only take 45 minutes or so. If you have three formative tasks, that's 2 hours and 15 minutes. The remaining 45 minutes would go to a brief staging (maybe 5 minutes) and the summative argument task (the remaining 45 minutes).

2. You might be able to use the wording of your supporting question to write the formative task. Just change the verb phrase. In the Uncle Tom's Cabin inquiry, the first supporting question --"How did Harriet Beecher Stowe describe slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin? " is articulated in the task as --"Write a summary of the plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that includes main ideas and supporting details from Stowe’s description of slavery in the book." See the connections?