Ready, set, go!
Time for our first formative assessment! What is a formative assessment you ask? Well, I will tell you. Formative assessments are formal or informal assessments that help us determine what students do or do not know while in the process of learning. Formative assessments help us to “adapt [our] teaching" to fit our students' needs and meet them where they are (Education Scotland, 2016, 0:28). Without formative assessments, students might be chugging along, nodding their heads and smiling as if they know absolutely everything that is coming out of their teacher's mouth, and their teacher would not know if they understood a single word of it until the end of the unit when she gives them their summative assessment ("sum" aka total of all teaching and learning). Thus it is important to administer these formative assessments continually during the course of our teaching and their learning so that we can fill gaps as they appear (William, 2017). If we wait until the end of a unit to identify these gaps, by then it will be too late to do anything about it. So give formative assessments and give them often! Again, these can be formal (worksheets, quizzes, homework, etc.) or they can be informal (thumbs up/down, collaborative discussions, content based games, etc.); and they can also be graded or ungraded! That's the fun of formative assessments--they can be anything you want them to be as long as they tell you something about your students' progress.
I tried my hand this week at creating a formative assessment using Google Slides and the Pear Deck extension. I like this extension because it is interactive, can help assess students with different input and output modalities, and it can be utilized whole class or be self-paced. If you shell out for the premium version, you get a bunch of extra goodies with it as well! So my formative assessment is about--drum roll, please!--you guessed it: Imagery, diction, and tone. The purpose of formative assessment is just for me to check in with students and figure out what I need to re-teach before the end of this mini-unit, or if we are ready to move on to more difficult tasks. Students will answer one multiple choice question asking them to choose the image that best fits a short passage from a short story; analyze the connotation of certain words; analyze the tone of a short, funny poem; analyze the diction of another passage and how it helps to create or develop the imagery; and finally it finishes with students having an opportunity to create their own passage and pair it with an appropriate and original image. Want to check it out? Try the student paced version by clicking on the image below!
Comments
Post a Comment