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."