On Target?
Formative Assessment
This set of targets concerns the use of formative assessment.
We ask three big questions:
In what ways are student ideas, strategies and reasoning processes brought out into the open?
In what ways do whole class activities or group interactions support the refinement of student thinking?
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The purpose of formative assessment is not to judge, score, or rank students, but to reveal what they understand so that we can help improve their learning, by building current understandings and making them more robust, while also addressing possible misunderstandings or misconceptions. That is, formative assessment involves orchestrating classroom activities that reveal the current state of student understanding during the learning process. Formative assessment may make use of quizzes or tests, but it involves much more. It often includes informal information gathering, e.g., posing questions that may bring out into the open incorrect assumptions or ideas that need to be challenged, or that help students realize that they need to dig more deeply into the content.
Formative assessment is the mechanism that helps to enrich all of the other dimensions. It’s when we see and hear student thinking that we know how the students are interacting with the content, and what sense students are making of it. With that knowledge we are better positioned to engage them with the content in meaningful ways, to adjust the level of cognitive demand, and to provide opportunities for he kind of sense making that enables students to make the mathematics their own.
Among the techniques found in the lessons are the following, which are useful in general:
- Using tasks for which students are likely to get different answers, which reveal underlying misconceptions and establish a context where students know there’s something to be sorted out
- Using mini-whiteboards so students can reveal their thinking or their answers, making it easy to survey the class
- Structuring collaborative activities that call for a product, meaning that conceptual issues need to be worked through by each group producing that product
- Providing opportunities for students to take stock of their understandings, so they become more reflective learners
- Having students produce posters or other displays of their work, so that other students can compare and contrast both their thinking and results. Using gallery walks or presentations.
These activities provide opportunities for students to serve as resources for each other, as they build and refine collective and individual understandings.
Formative Assessment
The extent to which classroom activities elicit student thinking and subsequent interactions respond to those ideas, building on productive beginnings and addressing emerging misunderstandings. Powerful instruction “meets students where they are” and gives them opportunities to deepen their understandings.