7 Benefits to Students of Formative Assessments

In our Department conversation last month teachers shared these reflections about why our grading reform effort* was good for kids.  As a group, English teachers developed, off the top of their heads, an impressive list of student benefits, including:

1. Students will be able to take more ownership over skills and material because they know expectations; 
2. Students will know where they're at with a given skill
3. It puts emphasis/focus on student learning of actual skills, rather than their ability to game the system.  
4. Students have more "at bats" for each skill
5. Teachers are more able to be responsive to specific students' needs
6. Students benefit from clearer expectations - they'll be able to recognize what's expected of them and how to achieve success with those expectations in mind
7.  Students become more confident and motivated

These are pretty close to what the experts** say: 

When formative assessment is well implemented the benefits include:

1. Defined learning goals
   Monitoring student progress regularly helps keep learning goals top of mind so students have a clear target to work towards, and teachers can help clear up misunderstandings before students get off track.
2. Increased rigor
   Practicing formative assessment helps teachers collect information that indicates student needs. Once teachers have an understanding of what students need to be successful, they can create a rigorous learning environment that will challenge every student to grow.
3. Improved academic achievement
   Providing students and teachers with regular feedback on progress toward their goals is the main function of formative assessment that will aid in increasing academic achievement. Formative assessment helps students close the gap between their current knowledge and their learning goals.
4. Enhanced student motivation
   Because formative assessment involves setting learning goals and measuring the progress towards those, this increases motivation. When students have a focus on where they’re aiming, results skyrocket.
5. Increased student engagement
   Students need to find meaning in the work they are asked to do in the classroom. Connecting the learning objectives with real-world problems and situations draws students into the instructional activities and feeds their natural curiosity about the world.
6. Focused and targeted feedback
   Descriptive feedback should highlight gaps in understanding and specifically inform students on how they can improve their learning rather than listing what they got wrong, thus facilitating a reciprocal learning process between teachers and students.²
7. Personalized learning experiences
   It’s the close analysis of formative assessment data that allows the teacher to examine his or her instructional practices and determine which are producing the desired results and which are not. Some that work for one group of students may not work for another group.
8. Self-regulated learners
   Teaching students the requisite skills to monitor and take responsibility for meeting their goals creates self-regulated learners. Give students examples of high-quality work along with multiple opportunities to review and correct their own work to build independent and autonomous thinkers.
9. Data-driven decisions
   Using the data gathered from frequent learning checks empowers teachers to make sound, informed decisions that are grounded in data.

*Our grading reform effort included moving to 80/20 grading (80% summative/20% everything else), and so included learning more about formative assessment and about assessment literacy, including creating learning targets.

** Experts:
Laura Greenstein.  "What Teachers Really Need to Know about Formative Assessment."  ASCD.  link
PowerSchool Blog.  "9 Benefits of using formative assessment" link

5 Learning Targets for Secondary English Class

Although it hasn't been without stress and hard work, we have learned a lot about learning targets this year.  Here are five examples from the department in the past couple months.  They represent excellent thinking.  This post ends with a review of Moss and Brookhart's definition of "learning targets" and their reminder that listing the learning target at the beginning of class is a part of a larger opening-class communication.

English 1:

I can  have a lengthy, natural, literary conversation about a novel with their peers.

I am able to name our first three comma rules (FANBOYS, coordinate adjectives, and Restrictive vs. non-restrictive).  

I am able to create a "rule" for FANBOY comma use after reviewing three example sentences.

English 2:

Given a rhetorical situation and evidence, I can analyze the impact of that evidence on a specific audience.

English 1H:  

I can identify examples of figurative language in a short chapter and discuss its purpose

I can find signposts and discuss the revealed deeper meaning on characterization, theme, author's purpose

English 2H: 
Students learning targets for the lesson:

Review:

• I can define tone.
• I can identify words and phrases that create a particular tone.

New:

• I can choose “strong” tone words and phrases to describe a passage.
• I can identify multiple “snippets” of evidence to support a conclusion about the tone(s) of a passage.

AP Language:  

In a group discussion, I will display the attributes of successful communication, such as listening, articulating and exchanging. 

When I am leading the discussion, I will demonstrate an ability to facilitate through questions created, which will prompt my classmates to think differently and creatively about the topic, rather than summarize the sources. 

Expert Questiong in Teaching

Expertise in many professions is easy to visualize and conceptualize.  Imagine the radiologist reading an MRI and seeing the tell-tale signs of a torn labrum.  Or, imagine a chef listening for the right sizzle in pan before browning a salmon filet.   Mechanics know what tools to use for specific jobs, like when to use a torque wrench and avoid stripping threads.

 I can imagine asking specific questions that, by their answer, would reveal the expertise. How do you know that's a sprain and not a severe strain?  How do you know when the filet is ready to flip? 

Teachers develop expertise using their own "tools" over thousands of hours teaching and planning.  I've been thinking about what questions expert teachers have ready answers to.  These questions, and other like them, might also be used to help develop the expertise of novice teachers.

Here are a few questions.  What questions would you add to this list?

1. When is group work a good idea?  When is it better to ask students to pair up?
2. What types of activities should you  ask students to do for homework in your discipline?  Which types of activities don't lend themselves to homework? 
3. If you request that class come to attention, what's the first thing that you do? And if that doesn't work, what's next on your play list? And then what?
4. Under what conditions is peer editing likely to succeed? When is it likely to fail?
5. When is it appropriate to use an analytic rubric?  a holistic rubric?  a single-point rubric?
6. Let's say that you feel that students are not understanding a topic (say... identifying authorial voice in a short piece of writing) that you thought would be a simple lesson.   You know that you could do a "fist-to-five" vote, a "3-2-1 summary," or create a multiple choice question.   Which is the best option?
7. What's the best way to group heterogeneously?  Homogeneously?
8.  A second semester senior doesn't turn in a homework assignment in the first week of class.  How much slack do you allow?   When do you enlist parents?  What if it were a sophomore?

5 Useful Low-Tech Formative Assessment Strategies

Here are few formative assessments that I've seen have high impact.  Some of them allow for immediate instructional pivots, some inform instruction for tomorrow or later.

1.  Justin, trying to figure out why classroom discussions were lagging in his senior class, created a single multiple choice question that asked "what's the main idea" of a short article students had just read in class.  All of the answer choices were quotations from the article.  How many students were able to pick the correct quotation? 50%.    Yikes.  Maybe the discussion was lagging because students didn't even know what the articles under discussion were saying!  He was able to pivot immediately to make sure students understood this article, and he pivoted in the long term to develop students' reading skills.

2.  Erin was helping develop students' abilities to infer subtle things in a fiction text (in this instance, what's the quality of the relationship between two characters) from choice of detail.  After some preliminary work, she asked students to read a one-page section and write on individual whiteboards a one-word characterization of the relationship.  Quickly, she glances around the room, and develops a good picture of how widely the students varied.  If students were pretty close, she'd move on in the lesson; if students' answers were "all over the place," she would know that she needs to circle back so students can more reliably move from detail to characterization.

3.  Mike has designed 3 rhetorical analysis tasks for three different types of text (a modern TV commercial, an Abigail Adams letter, and Martin Luther King Speech) and assigns a single score to each essay (following Marzano's 1-4 scale).  At the end of the third rhetorical analysis task, he scans the grades of each student, looking for proficiency at 3.  He finds that 7 students are not easily earning 3s.  So, he plans a lesson for later this week when he'll meet with those 7 students one-on-one to diagnose the difficulty and get them over the hump while the other students are doing a close reading task that, in past years, he's given as homework.

4.  Cherise has two student-led discussions going at the same time in her classroom.  She floats between the groups, taking running records on her tablet.  She's working hard not to listen to the content of the discussion, but just for the ways that the conversation moves between students.  Are students summarizing previous students' comments before moving on? Are they disagreeing in a way that builds rather than ends conversation?  Are the student discussion leaders asking follow up questions?  At the end of the lesson, Cherise reports out to the class, praising studnets' efforts and accomplishments.  She doesn't say "good job," but "I heard Jeremy do a nice job acknowledging alternative viewpoints.  I heard Cynthia summarizing and connecting from Tasha's point to her own."  The italicized words were the key goals of the discussion.

5.  Last year I was working with students to be build their knowledge of sentence parts, both for prose variety and for sentence punctuation.  I was teaching, specifically, how independent clauses and dependent clauses come together as complex or compound sentences (etc.).  Sometimes I would start a class with a one-sentence quiz.  I would say something like "write a D-I sentence, using the clause 'the zombies ate my dog's brain' somewhere in the sentence."  At the time we were doing 10 minutes of independent reading per day.  During that 10 minutes, I was quickly able to sort the 26 one-sentences quizzes into "yes" and "no" piles and to squat down alongside each student who made a mistake and talk them through the answer immediately.  Three correct answers in a row would make me "graduate" a student from opening quizzes.

5 Class Strategies that Probably Aren't Formative

A Google Search for "Formative Assessment" will turn up any number of things like "17 Awesome Formative Assessment Tools" or "56 Formative Assessments for the Classroom"  While it might seem like these sites would be a fabulous resource for teachers interested in using more formative assessment, I've found that these sites offer a number of class activities that aren't really formative at all.

Formative assessments should provide you, the teacher, data that allows you to pivot your instruction.   You can't tell whether a formative assessment is "truly formative" by the form that it takes:  great formative assessments can be oral, multiple choice, short answer, T/F... anything, really.  And you can't tell whether a formative assessment is worthwhile by it's length:  excellent formative assessments can be anywhere from a single question designed to ferret out a possible misunderstanding to a full dress rehearsal of the summative assessment.

But -- and this is what's most important -- assessments aren't formative if they don't give you accurate data about what they're intended to measure.  And assessments aren't formative if they don't give you accurate data from some students.

Most activities can be adapted so that you can get data that you can pivot from, but here are few that I've found on some of these websites  that don't seem likely to provide very rich data:

1. "Ask students 'Do you understand?' and get a sense from the nodding heads."
2.  "Watch Body Language.  If you pay careful attention to the body language of children, you'll  get a sense of their comprehension"
3. "Thumbs Up/ Thumbs Down.  Ask the class if they understood a key concept.  Thumbs up if they get it; thumbs down if they don't." 
4. "Two Roses and a Thorn.  Name two things you liked about a chapter and one that you didn't."
5. "Think/Pair/Share. Listen as students discuss a question to gauge their understanding."

Here are 5 more
6. "Partner Quizzes" (or partner anything)
7. "Graded Discussions" and "Socratic Seminars" (See a separate blog entry about this here.)
8. "Jigsaw"
9. "Group Debates" (or group annotation or group anything)
10. "Carousel"

This is not to say that all of these activities don't have a place in a teacher's toolbox. On the contrary, many of these are great activities for helping students deepen their understanding and practice concepts, and some might provide you with some good data that shows that students  didn't understand.    Still, none of these classroom activities are likely to provide good, individualized data about how students are doing on specific concepts. 

I keep thinking of quotes like Edutopia's Vicki Davis: "Test scores should never be a surprise. You don’t need to be a mind reader—you just need a formative assessment toolbox, and you need to use it every day."  While I might quibble with the real-world practicality "need to to use it every day," I love the notion of always trying to create micro assessments that will predict how a student might do on "test day."

Simplify your Life with a Single-Point Rubic

When we talk about rubrics, usually what comes to mind is one of these two things:

Analytic Rubric
Jennifer Gonzalez "Know Your Terms"

Holistic Rubric
Jennifer Gonzalez "Know Your Terms" 

These have names.  The first is an "Analytic Rubric."  The benefits include it's use in helping students know how they performed on a wide-variety of tasks and, honestly, in justifying grades.  If it's well created, it also shows students "next steps" they might take.  The drawbacks of these include the fact that they're hard to create (some rows seem to lend themselves to four level (or more!) of quality, while others often only have a couple meaningful differences. Writing 25 or more different descriptions is a chore.     I find holistic rubrics a challenge because I'm always torn between two levels of success and find myself circling the line between two categories. Because of this, I spend so much time arguing back and forth with myself on each row.   More importantly, kids don't use them at all, except when they want to earn one more point to get to an "A" so they ask you to justify your points.  And whenever a student doesn't put your feedback to use, it has been a waste of your time.  Still, these rubrics are good when you want to be comprehensive.

The "Holistic Rubric" is familiar as the "AP-Style" rubric, the "SAT writing" rubric,  and what most of us use for the SLO.  The big benefit is in saving time in grading.  When I'm using a holistic rubric, I find it much easier to think "well, we could quibble about the use of evidence in some parts, but generally, this is an above average piece of writing, but not highly successful... so, it's a 3."  The biggest negative is in showing "next steps" for students.  Still, for summative tasks and when "whole class feedback" will be your main form of feedback, they're a good, quick choice.


I recently learned about a third type of rubric, the "Single-Point Rubric."  

Single-Point Rubric

 

A single-point rubric outlines the standards a student has to meet to complete the assignment; however, it leaves the categories outlining success or shortcoming open-ended.  The main disadvantage that I see in this rubric is that it might require more writing on the teacher's part; having said that, when I see teachers in the department office grading on analytic rubrics, I often see a teachers writing novellas to the students in the margins.  Still, there are a number of distinct advantages.  Danah Hashem in Edutopia outlines what she finds to be the 6 advantages of the rubric.  My favorites are #1 and #2 and #6 (kids are more likely to use it!).

1. It gives space to reflect on both strengths and weaknesses in student work. Each category invites teachers to meaningfully share with students what they did really well and where they might want to consider making some adjustments.

2. It doesn’t place boundaries on student performance. The single-point rubric doesn’t try to cover all the aspects of a project that could go well or poorly. It gives guidance and then allows students to approach the project in creative and unique ways. It helps steer students away from relying too much on teacher direction and encourages them to create their own ideas.

3. It works against students’ tendency to rank themselves and to compare themselves to or compete with one another. Each student receives unique feedback that is specific to them and their work, but that can’t be easily quantified.

4. It helps take student attention off the grade. The design of this rubric emphasizes descriptive, individualized feedback over the grade. Instead of focusing on teacher instruction in order to aim for a particular grade, students can immerse themselves in the experience of the assignment.

5. It creates more flexibility without sacrificing clarity. Students are still given clear explanations for the grades they earned, but there is much more room to account for a student taking a project in a direction that a holistic or analytic rubric didn’t or couldn’t account for.

6. It’s simple! The single-point rubric has much less text than other rubric styles. The odds that our students will actually read the whole rubric, reflect on given feedback, and remember both are much higher.

Here are two more  examples of a single-point rubric to make it more general, then more specific.

Jennifer Gonzalez "Your Rubric is a Mess"

(add edutopia image here)



Sources
Jennifer Hashem in Edutopia "6 Reasons to Try a Single-Point Rubric."

Jennifer Gonzalez in Brilliant or Insane? Education on the Edge "Your Rubric is a Hot Mess.  Here's How to Fix It."

See also:  Jennifer Gonzalez, in her Cult of Pedagogy blog, writes a "Know Your Terms" post about different types of rubrics.

Protocol for communicating the lesson goals

Consider these two similar class openings that might precede the same exact lesson and assessment.

Opening #1
Teacher:  Today, we're learning how to use participles at the beginning, middle, and end of a sentence.  We're going to review the definitions, then you'll work in groups on a creative writing assignment that asks you to use what you've learned.  Finally, we'll do a quick quiz that tests your knowledge.

Opening #2
Teacher:  Today, by the end of class, you'll be able to demonstrate your skill in writing sentences with participles at the beginning, middle, and end of a sentence.  After reviewing the definitions, we'll  practice several times in groups and pairs to make sure that you've learned it correctly and deeply. These practices will also be little creative writing exercises.   At the end of class, we'll do a quick quiz to help me see how well each of us understands.

The small difference is crucial.  The first one emphasizes what the teacher is presenting and what the students are "doing" in the class.  In contrast, the second emphasizes what the students should be learning and how (and why) they'll be learning and assessed.     Dylan Wiliam might say that the key question of teaching has shifted from in these two openings from  “what am I going to teach and what are the pupils going to do?” towards “how am I going to teach this and what are the pupils going to learn?" 

I am trying to use class openings like the second one because I believe it has a positive effect on student engagement.  It casts the teacher as a coach and organizer of learning activities.  It makes the quiz at the end about feedback rather than individual performance.

Moss and Brookhart might suggest that we add two other pieces to the opening: a preview of the assessment task and an explanation about why this learning is important for the class and for life.  

Those two things would be easy to add to Opening #2.  The teacher might add, orally, the quiz format (The quiz will be something like this: I'll give you a sentence stem, like 'The zombie ate my shoulder" and I'll ask you to add to this, like by adding a past participle phrase after the subject of the sentence.  That'll be the whole quiz.)  The teacher might also add a quick reflection about the importance of this skill.  (We've been talking about how its important to have a variety of sentence types in your writing, and we've been practicing both compound (FANBOY) and complex sentences.  Those will get you pretty far in school and in life.  But the next step in sophistication, something that professional authors do all the time to bring life to their writing, is using past and presenting participles.  If you are able to use them in your writing in a variety of ways, you'll be on your way to writing life a professional.  It's a good tool to have in your tool belt.)

The Five Key Strategies of Formative Assessment

(source)

It's easy to get lost in the weeds of formative assessment because it's a really complex topic that deals with both instruction and assessment.   Some of the common questions include: What's the difference between formative and summative?  How long should a formative assessment be?  How often should I be doing formative assessment?  Does formative assessment mean that I have to do differentiated instruction every day?

These are important questions that need to be dealt with.  But it's good to keep the big picture in mind.  Dylan Wiliam helps me keep the big picture in mind with this:  the key question of teaching has shifted from “what am I going to teach and what are the pupils going to do?” towards “how am I going to teach this and what are the pupils going to learn?"  

Dylan Wiliam's book, Embedded Formative Assessment, is filled with a number of insights culled from his 35 years of experience in education.   The book's "Five Key Strategies of Formative Assessment" acts as a "10,0000 foot view" about formative assessment.  

1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success – getting the students to really understand what their classroom experience will be and how their success will be measured.

2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning – developing effective classroom instructional strategies that allow for the measurement of success.

3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward – working with students to provide them the information they need to better understand problems and solutions.

4. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another – getting students involved with each other in discussions and working groups can help improve student learning.

5. Activating learners as owners of their own learning – By engaging in the process of thinking about and assessing their own work, students act on the evidence of their own learning and take responsibility for it.

It's OK to get messy!

One thing I've realized about the move to formative assessments and assessment literacy is that it's really messy and things don't always work out the way you wanted them to.  There are false starts and failed attempts.  And, there is no perfect time to get started without unraveling many perfectly good assignments and lessons.  That's scary and uncomfortable.  But I also know firsthand the benefits to students when I know (and students know) where they are in their learning and I can respond quickly to misunderstanding.  And I know for sure that a wider swath of students is buying into my teaching, and that feels good.  So, that means that I'm trying new formative things this year when I can, often adapting things on my drive into work. There is no master plan. The results are not always pretty!

I'm trying something new over the next couple days in Rhetoric.  Inspired by Catlin Tucker's blog post on "Stop Grading at Home," and her "Station Rotation Model,"  I've been experimenting with ways to provide feedback (and grade) kids live in class.  I've been wanting to do it all year, have tried a couple things that have been too cumbersome, and only now, with trepidation, am I taking the full plunge.  I'm excited, and I expect that some things will go well and others will be a mess.  

And that's why I'm writing now.  I know that you might feel like assessment literacy is daunting and intimidating.  I know that teachers, as a rule, like things to be planned and outcomes to be predictable; we like the tried and true.  So, in case I haven't made this clear before: I'd like to give you "official" permission to experiment with assessment literacy and permission to fail.

Try. Experiment. Attempt. Jump in. Take a stab at it. Give it a go.   Use your classroom as you might use a science lab, with a well thought-out experimentation plan and a means for analyzing and evaluating the results. It's okay if you blow something up.  It’s okay when your plan fails.  In fact, that's where the learning happens.