By checking in with students throughout instruction, outstanding instructors constantly revise and refine their teaching to meet the diverse needs of students. Assessment drives learning What and how students learn depends to a major extent on how they think they will be assessed. Assessment practices must send the right signals to students about what to study, how to study, and the relative time to spend on concepts and skills in a course. Accomplished faculty communicate clearly what students need to know and be able to do, both through a clearly articulated syllabus, and by choosing assessments carefully in order to direct student energies.
High expectations for learning result in students who rise to the occasion. If done well, the feedback provided to students will indicate to them how to improve their performance. Assessments must clearly match the content, the nature of thinking, and the skills taught in a class.
Through feedback from instructors, students become aware of their strengths and challenges with respect to course learning outcomes. Assessment done well should not be a surprise to students. In the past decade, there has been a push for stronger data and information to drive instruction before a final test. In traditional classrooms, a summative assessment at the end of the unit told educators how students mastered the content. In many cases, this was too late to change instruction, and teachers did not have a lot of time to go back and reteach the unit's content.
In progressive and proactive classrooms over the past decade, teachers are devising formative data that drives instruction on a daily basis. In this fashion, teachers believe they can assure that all students are mastering the content along the way.
Powerful and effective formative assessment data helps predict how students will do on the summative assessments at the end of the unit. Many school districts have created common formative assessments for teachers to use with the district-mandated curriculum. In other school districts, teachers create their own formative assessments to use with students. Whatever is chosen for use, the data should drive the next steps for instruction.
Assessments that are given and the data is not being used are a waste of time and these practices should be reviewed. Formative assessments should be devised from the learning criteria for a given lesson, or unit of study. Starting with the end in mind, working backwards is a best practice. After summative assessments are created, aligning formative assessments will give educators powerful information for making instruction decisions. Formative assessments should be quick for students to take, as well as informative for teachers to determine student needs and instructional effectiveness.
Here are 20 quick formative assessments according to blogger Sarah Dougherty :. Many teachers agree that formative assessment needs to be used in classrooms. Yet, some of these teachers do not know what to do with the data that is collected. Exemplary teachers have plan; they understand that something needs to be done with this data immediately.
A teacher needs to alter instruction and curriculum for individual students, small groups, and even for classrooms according to the collected data. Personalizing the learning, or differentiation, is proven to be a powerful instructional practice and intervention.
A teacher must determine the next steps. Unfortunately, some teachers move on. Exemplary teachers dig deeper into this formative data. They answer the following questions when they look at the data:. After these questions have been answered and students have been grouped, then a teacher must decide on what the best instructional strategies should be used for each individual students or for groups of students.
Gone are the days of teaching it "louder" and "redoing the same instructional strategy" when re-teaching a concept. Exemplary teachers must change the curriculum materials or instructional strategy to meet the needs of the individual students or groups of students. Differentiating the process, content, or product, as described by Carol Ann Tomlinson, is best practice. Read more about Tomlinson's research here. According to research by John Hattie, student feedback is one of the top ten influences on educational achievement according to Feedback in Schools.
Too many times teachers hand back an assessment without ever giving any verbal feedback, or merely writing a grade on it. The grade of course symbolizes the effort level of the student that parents and society have been accustomed to for over a century. Yet, there is more behind this grade. Exemplary teachers understand that behind a letter grade of "C" there is a whole other story about student achievement.
Feedback on student progress should start in the beginning of the lesson. It should continue during the lesson as students are forming their understanding of the concept, as well as at the end of the lesson…when typically summative assessments are given. In the article, Feedback in Schools, Hattie discusses seven understandings that teachers should follow when giving effective feedback as summarized by the author of this blog :. Transferring power to students in order to monitoring their own learning can be difficult.
There are many strategies teachers can use in order for students to create a strong sense of agency. The second practice helps us notice how students are thinking, what representations they might be using.
The observations and conversations we make here can be very powerful pieces of assessment data for us! Using our observations and conversations from practice 2, we can now make informed decisions. Would you present misconceptions first? Or would you start with the simplest sample first? The 4th practice asks us to sequence a few student samples in order to construct a conversation that will help all of our students understand the mathematics that can be learned from the problem.
This requires us to use our understanding of the mathematics our students are learning in relation to previous learning and where the concepts will eventually lead a developmental continuum or landscape or trajectory is useful here 5. We often state how great it is that we are different, but it is really important to show how the math each student is doing connects! In the 5th and final practice, we orchestrate the conversation to help our class make connections between concepts, representations, strategies, big ideas… Our role here is to assess where the conversation should go based on the conversations, observations and products we have seen so far.
Which one is going to help me keep on track? Which one will help my students see themselves as capable mathematicians? Which one will help my students learn the mathematics we are learning? Whether we look at data from a unit, or from the day, or throughout each step in a lesson, Daro has 2 quotes that have helped form my opinion on the topic:. When our focus in on these gaps, our instruction is likely more skills oriented, more procedural…. I believe when we boil down mathematics into the tiniest pieces then attempt to provide students with exactly the things they need, we lose out on the richness of the subject, we rob our students of the experiences that are empowering, we deny them the opportunity to think and engage in real discourse, or become interested and invested in what they are learning.
If our goal is to constantly find needs, then spend our time filling these needs, we are doing our students a huge disservice. On the other hand, if we provide problems that offer every student access to the mathematics, and allow our students to answer in ways that makes sense to them, we open up the subject for everyone.
However, we still need to use our assessment data to drive our instruction. What if an English teacher used a spelling test as their assessment piece right before their unit on narratives? What will their instruction look like for the next few days? Lots of memorization of spelling words… very little writing!
What if a Science teacher took a list of all of the vocabulary from a unit on Simple Machines and asked each student to match each term with its definition as their initial assessment?
What would this teacher figure our their students needed more of? Obviously they would find that their students need more work with defining terms. Lots of definitions and memorizing terms… very little experiments! What if a physical education teacher gave a quiz on soccer positions, rules, terms to start a unit on playing soccer. What would this teacher figure out? What would their next few days look like?
Lots of reading of terms, rules, positions… very little physical activity! Although multifactorial and complex in nature, medical students' self-reported drive to study a subject is directly influenced by the weighting of the subject in the overall scheme of assessment.
Abstract The debate around which factors drive medical students' learning is ongoing and controversial.
0コメント