Performing Formative Assessment and Using Data

Excellent article with four means of collecting formative assessment data, and with encouragement to abandon plan to redirect. "Learning is not about the teacher being ready, it's about the ... See More

Excellent article with four means of collecting formative assessment data, and with encouragement to abandon plan to redirect. "Learning is not about the teacher being ready, it's about the student being ready."

Going Beyond Teach, Test, and Hope for the Best!

In this article a group of high school teachers share their stories and journey as they devise ways to help their students learn and as they improve their professional abilities to continual... See More

In this article a group of high school teachers share their stories and journey as they devise ways to help their students learn and as they improve their professional abilities to continually check for understanding. Using ideas taught to us from the Understanding by Design authors, McTighe and Wiggins, four questions were used to frame the article: What is important for students to understand? How do teachers know what students understand? How do students know what they know? And What is to be done with all this knowledge? In the process of answering those four questions, a chart was created for the reader’s convenience. Called “A Formative Assessment Toolbox”, the chart contains a few formative assessment techniques that teachers can use to check their students’ understanding. Many teachers discovered that by taking the time to assess the status of their students’ learning periodically, students didn’t know as much as their teachers thought they did. It was an eye-opener and helped these teachers better plan their next instructional moves to increase their student’s understanding of the key concepts they were trying to teach.