Formative Assessment vs Summative Assessment
Formative assessment is used to improve learning while it is happening, while summative assessment is used to evaluate learning at the end of a unit or course.
Continuous Formative Assessment
Continuous Formative Assessment employs synchronous collaborative web-based documents to perform continuous, real-time formative assessments of student understanding so that science teachers can adjust their instruction to address the immediate needs of their students. There are numerous ways to perform continuous formative assessment, one of which is the online "quickwrite".
Quickwrite
An online "quickwrite" is a collaborative spreadsheet in which students enter responses to prompts. As students enter their responses, teachers scan the developing response table to assess student understanding and adjust instruction accordingly. For example, if few students provide an adequate written response, a teacher may pose a new question in a simpler format such as multiple-choice. By programming the spreadsheet appropriately, the teacher obtains statistical data to indicate the percentages of students that understand or have specific misconceptions. The teacher freezes the name column (row header) and the question row (column header) and opens a new column next to student names. This insures that each current response is adjacent to the student’s name while simultaneously storing previous responses in columns to the right. The teacher opens a new worksheet for each day and tracks student performance and understanding by tabbing through worksheets from previous lessons.
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