Reading Success for All Students: Using Formative Assessment to Guide Instruction and Intervention

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The Resource Reading success for all students: Gunning, electronic resource Resource Information. The item Reading success for all students: Gunning, electronic resource represents a specific, individual, material embodiment of a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri-Kansas City. This item is available to borrow from 4 library branches. Creator Gunning, Thomas G.

Summary "Help for reading teachers in continuous monitoring, assessment and instruction that targets students' problem areas This vital resource offers classroom teachers and literacy coaches practical assessments that can be used to evaluate key areas in students' reading performance. These assessments will provide information that can be directly used for planning instruction. Specific instructional techniques and activities are linked to each of the assessments so that teachers know exactly how to teach necessary skills.

Tests and other evaluative devices are aligned with Common Core State Standards and state frameworks. Offers a proven model for monitoring and assessing students Assessments and instructional strategies are easy to implement as part of any curriculum Practical strategies are modeled on a tested approach for helping students work through their problem areas "--Provided by publisher.

In fact, the more diverse your assessment approaches, the better idea you have of student performance capabilities. Related Articles Technology in the Classroom: Games that Kids Create Our favorite game creation technology in the classroom tools for students. Technology in the Classroom: Classroom Management for Unsupportive Parents A few classroom management suggestions on how to deal with parents that just Simply giving students an opportunity to reflect on their learning can give insight into their capability. This can be done in something like a formal journal, or something informal like an Exit Slip.

Students can perform a reflection or summary of recent content by responding to a class activity, assignment, or direct instruction. This can be a very informal process, but just giving students a chance to talk to one another about the content through guided discussion can go a long way in determining how well they understand the material.

Whole class, small group, or partner discussions are great ways to gain insight into how they are processing content. Traditional Homework and Quizzes. Infinite varieties of homework and quizzes exist, but if you utilize some of these, you will have a fairly concrete, measurable product that indicates student learning. If there is an upcoming summative assessment, then perhaps design quasi-formal formative assessments modeled off of the summative.

In addition to discussions, having students work with one another to create a concrete product helps students solidify their learning and demonstrate their proficiency. As you more frequently implement formal and informal formative assessments along the above guidelines, you will be able to better respond to student progress. While we commonly rely on summative assessments to determine what students have learned, the better we can utilize formative assessments along the way will help students perform more proficiently in the long run.

What are different formative assessment strategies you have, and how you use them to guide instruction in your classroom? Share your experiences in the comments below! In addition to being National Board Certificated, he also has worked with the Illinois Association of Teachers of English and currently serves as a school board member for a private school.

View the discussion thread. The titles emphasize some important components of the assessment process. The K-4 science content standard on science and technology is supported by the idea that students should be able to communicate the purpose of a design. The K-4 physical science standard is supported by the fundamental understanding of the characteristics of sound, a form of energy. Students demonstrate the products of their design work to their peers and reflect on what the project taught them about the nature of sound and the process of design.

This can be public, group, or individual, embedded in teaching. This activity assesses student progress toward understanding the purpose and processes of design. The information will be used to plan the next design activity. The activity also permits the teacher to gather data about understanding of sound. Third-grade students have not completed a design project. Their task is to present the product of their work to their peers and talk about what they learned about sound and design as a result of doing the project.

This is a challenging task for third-grade students, and the teacher will have to provide considerable guidance to the groups of students as they plan their presentations. As described in the science standards, the teacher provided the following directions that served as a framework that students could use to plan their presentations.

Reading Success for All Students: Using Formative Assessment to Guide Instruction and Intervention

Describe to the class the purpose function that the other parts of the instrument have. Show the class how you can change the pitch how high or how low the sound is of the sound. In order to evaluate the student performance, the teacher used the following guidelines:. Student understanding of sound will be revealed by understanding that the sound is produced in the instrument by the part of the instrument that vibrates moves rapidly back and forth , that the pitch how high or how low can be changed by changing how rapidly the vibrating part moves, and the loudness can be changed by the force how hard you pluck, tap, or blow the vibrating part with which the vibrating part is set into motion.

An average student perfor-. An exemplary performance by a student would include not only the ability to identify the source of the vibration but also to change pitch and loudness in both directions. Student understanding of the nature of technology will be revealed by the student's ability to reflect on why people make musical instruments —to improve the quality of life—as well as by their explanations of how they managed to make the instrument despite the constraints faced—that is, the ability to articulate why the conceptualization and design turned out to be different from the instrument actually made.

There is no one best assessment system for the classroom. What works for Ms. R in their classrooms may not work in another. What is important is that assessment is an ongoing activity, one that relies on multiple strategies and sources for collecting information that bears on the quality of student work and that then can be used to help both the students and the teacher think more pointedly about how the quality might be improved.

In the first vignette, Ms. K is helping her students by painting the broad landscape so that they can see how their work fits into a wider context. She also reminds them of the criteria for quality work. Thus, she is helping them to develop a clear view of what they are to achieve and where they are going. At this stage, the view is usually clearer to the teacher than to the students.

One of her responsibilities is to help the students understand and share the goals, which will become progressively clearer to them as the inquiry progresses. To chart student progress, Ms. K relies on several strategies and sources: These opportunities are part of the natural flow of classroom life, indistinguishable for her and for the students from collecting data, discussing findings, planning next steps, drawing conclusions, and communicating findings about the main concepts they are expected to learn. In helping her students to reach their goal, she bases her actions on multiple pieces of evidence that she gleans from activities embedded in her teaching and curriculum.

She uses this information to make decisions about work time, about support she needs to provide, and about resource suggestions. She frames an assessment task in a way that will engage students to learn as they prepare for the final presentation and concert. Peer-design reviews, conversations, and other assessments were built into the activity of designing and building instruments so that students could draw from these to inform their design and construction of instruments.

She provides the students with prompts and elements that should be included in their presentations so that the students will be clear on what is required. She has clear guidelines about the quality and depth of responses in terms of how students will demonstrate their understandings and skills. The usefulness of assessment does not stop at teachers collecting information in the course of their teaching and providing feedback. R, they plan and structure specific assessment events, such as individual conferences with students, occasions for the students to write about a topic, design reviews, observations of students at work, presentations of work, and initiating whole-class discussion of what they have learned so far.

Classroom Management: Best Uses of Formative Assessments

These are just some of the many assessment activities and methods available to teachers and students. In these same scenarios, teachers could also have integrated the use of additional written assessments—including selected response, short answer, essay, lab reports, homework problems, among others —into their teaching in ways that would generate rich assessment opportunities.

Throughout this text, we have attempted to avoid technical terms whenever possible. When we do use them, we try to offer a definition or use it in a context where its meaning makes sense. Box provides operational definitions of several terms you will find in the assessment literature. Assessments that are different in form than traditional paper-and-pencil assessments. Assessments that allow students to demonstrate their understandings and skills to a teacher or an outsider as they perform a certain activity.

They are evaluated by a teacher or an outsider on the quality of their ability to perform specific tasks and the products they create in the process. The student is involved in selecting pieces of work and includes self-reflections of what understandings the piece of work demonstrates. Thus, criteria for selection and evaluation need to be made clear prior to selection. Assessments that require students to perform complex tasks representative of activities actually done in out-of-school settings.

Now, consider the assessment in the two vignettes in light of the following three guiding questions: Where are you trying to go? Where are you now? How can you get there? The goals articulated in the Standards arise from their emphasis on the active nature of science and their stress on the range of activities that encompass what it means to do science and to understand both specific concepts and the subject area as a whole. Thus, the Standards advocate going beyond the coverage of basic facts to include skills and thought processes, such as the ability to ask questions, to construct and test explanations of phenomena, to communicate ideas, to work with data and use evidence to support arguments, to apply knowledge to new situations and new questions, to problem solve and make decisions, and to understand history and nature of scientific knowledge NRC, To best assist students in their science learning, assessment should attend to these many facets of learning, including content understanding, application, processes, and reasoning.

The quality of any assessment depends first and foremost on the clarity and appropriateness of our definitions of the achievement target to be assessed We cannot assess academic achievement effectively if we do not know and understand what that valued target is. As Stiggins states, it is important that teachers have clear performance criteria in mind before they assess student work and responses.

R's guidelines included attention to both: Before the students engaged in the assessment, Ms. R had outlined how she would evaluate the student responses in each area. Clarity about the overall goals is only a first step. Given that goals are clear, the teacher has to help the students achieve greater clarity. This usually entails identification of somewhat discrete stages that will help the students to understand what is required to move toward the goal.

These intermediate steps often emerge as the study progresses, often in lesson design and planning but also on the spot in the classroom as information about the students' levels of understanding become clearer, new special interests become apparent, or unexpected learning difficulties arise. One of the goals of the Standards is for all students to become independent lifelong learners. The standards emphasize the integral role that regular self-assessment plays in achieving this goal. Students need the opportunity to evaluate and reflect on their own scientific understanding and ability.

Before students can do this, they need to understand the goals for learning science. The ability to self-assess understanding is an essential tool for self-directed learning. Yet, conveying to students the standards and criteria for good work is one of the most difficult aspects of involving them in their own assessment. Again, teachers can use various ways to help students develop and cultivate these insights. Following the example of Ms. K's class in the first vignette, students and teachers can become engaged in a substantive, assessment conversation about what is a good presentation, such as a good lab investigation or a good reading summary while engaging students in the development process of assessment rubrics.

K facilitates frequent conversations with her class about what constitutes good work. Although these discussions occur at the beginning of the project period, she regularly and deliberately cycles back to issues of expectations and quality to increase their depth of understanding as they get more involved in their projects. In discussions of an exemplary piece of work, she encourages the students to become as specific as possible. Over time, the students begin to help refine some of the criteria by which they will be evaluated.

Such a process not only helps to make the criteria more useful; it increases their ownership of the standards by which judgments will be made about their work. For her third graders, Ms. R provides guidelines for planning and presenting their instruments and introduces questions for the students to address as they engage in their work.

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Of course, the process is not quite so linear. It is not unusual for the goals to change somewhat as the students and teachers get more involved in the study. K's and Ms R's classrooms demonstrate the many ways assessment information can be obtained.

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In the first scenario, conferences with students allow Ms. K to ask questions, hear specifics of project activity, and probe student reasoning and thought processes. She can get a sense of how and where the individuals are making contributions to their group 's work and help to ensure that they share the work at hand, including development of an understanding of the underlying processes and content addressed by the activity. The information she learns as a result of these conferences will guide decisions on time allocation, pace, resources, and learning activities that she can help provide.

After observations and listening to students discuss instruments, Ms. R made the judgment that her students were ready to continue with the activity. The journals prepared by Ms. K's students and the individual reflections of Ms. R's provided the teachers with an indication of their understanding of the scientific concepts they were working with, and thereby allowed them to gain new and different insights into their respective students' work. The entries also provided the teachers with a mechanism, though not the only one, to gain some insight into the individual student's thinking, understanding, and ability to apply knowledge.

K's class, the journal writing was regular enough that the teacher's comments and questions posed in response to the entries could guide the students as they revisit previous work and move on to related activities and reflections. Through such varied activities, the teachers in the vignettes are able to see how the students make sense of the data, the context into which they place the data, as well as the opportunity to evaluate and then assist the students on the ability to articulate their understandings and opinions in a written format or by incorporating understandings into a design.

As they walk around the room, listening, observing, and interacting with students, both teachers take advantage of the data they collect. Any single assessment is not likely to be comprehensive enough to provide high-quality information in all the important areas so that a student or teacher can make use of the data.

K, for example, would not use the student conferences to obtain all the information she needs about student comprehension and involvement. She gets different information from reading student journals. In the individual reflections, Ms.

R can get additional data to complement or. The occasions to sit with, converse with, question, and listen to the students gave Ms. R the opportunities to employ powerful questioning strategies as an assessment tool. When teachers ask salient open-ended questions and allow for an appropriate window or wait time Rowe, —they can spur student thinking and be privy to valuable information gained from the response.

Questions do not need to occur solely in whole-group discussion. The strategy can occur one-on-one as the teacher circulates around the room. Effective questioning that elicits quality responses is not easy. In addition to optimal wait-time, it requires a solid understanding of the subject matter, attentive consideration of each student's remarks, as well as skillful crafting of further leading questions. In the vignette, Ms. K needed to be aware of the existence and causes of algal blooms in order to ask questions that may lead her students down productive paths in exploring them.

The close examination of student work also is invaluable, and teachers do it all the time. Continued and careful consideration of student work can enlighten both teacher and student. R in the vignettes, teachers are not concerned with just one dimension of learning. To plan teaching and to meet their students' needs, they need to recognize if a student understands a particular concept but demonstrates difficulty in applying it in a personal investigation or if a student does not comprehend fundamental ideas underlying the concept.

Specific information regarding the sources of confusions can be useful in planning activities or in initiating a conversation between students and the teacher. An array of strategies and forms of assessment to address the goals that the student and teacher have established allows students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understandings. This is important if we hope to support all students. A comprehensive understanding of science requires more than knowledge of scientific information and skills. The Standards articulate the breadth and depth of what it means to know and be able to do in science at different grade levels.

To help ensure that assessment addresses and supports a broader view of science understanding, it can be helpful to consider the different dimensions that comprise knowledge in science. Some aspects of science knowledge are highlighted in Box With knowledge of the student's strengths, a teacher can help ensure that any particular assessment allows the student to demonstrate understanding and can assess whether information would be better gathered in a different format to allow for that opportunity to express thinking in different ways.

K collects her assessment data from a variety of places, including discussions, conversations, conferences, observations, journals and written work, in addition to providing useful information, relying on a variety of sources and using a variety of formats so as not to privilege any one way of knowing.

The conferences she sets up and the conversations that ensue give her opportunities to probe understandings and confusions and reach students that may not be as articulate when it comes to written work. Stiggins encourages teachers to devise classroom assessments of five different, but related, kinds of expectations:. In their work in science assessment, Shavelson and Ruiz-Primo attend to the following aspects of knowledge:. They, too, stress that different forms of assessment are better suited for different aspects of knowledge. This complexity is important to consider when developing a rich and comprehensive assessment system.

Any classroom assessment system should assess and support growth in all areas. A single type or form of assessment will not be able to capture all of the dimensions of scientific knowing and doing. Thus the form that assessment takes is significant. The form and content of assessment should be consistent with the intended purpose.

Underlying this guideline is the technical notion of validity. Technical features are discussed later in this chapter. Validity centers on whether the assessment is measuring or capturing what it is intended to measure or capture.

If content understanding is the goal, it is necessary to design an appropriate assessment that would tap into that dimension of their understanding. If the ability to design an investigation is the goal, it is necessary to provide the opportunity for a student to demonstrate her ability to do such an activity. Validity is not, then, an inherent property of an individual assessment; rather, the interpretations drawn from the data and the subsequent actions that ensue are either valid or invalid.

Choices for the form of the assessments are extensive and should be guided by the goals set for student learning. From Stiggins' book, Student-Involved Classroom Assessment, Figure offers questions to consider when designing, selecting, or implementing an assessment. After first advising teachers to set clear and appropriate targets—or learning and performance goals—and convey these targets to their students, he stresses the importance of selecting appropriate methods and of taking care to avoid invalidity and bias.

Effective formative assessment must be informed by theories to ensure that it elicits the important goals of science, including a student 's current understanding and procedural capability. The elements of curriculum goals and methods of instruction come together, for part of the instructor's task is to frame subgoals that are effective in guiding progress towards curriculum goals.

However, this can only be done in light of the teacher's beliefs about how best to help students to learn.

This introduces learning theory in addition to assessment, but in formative assessment these are very closely intertwined. Thus there has to be a conceptual analysis of the subject goals, which also is complemented by analysis of the cognitive capacities of the learners. Examples of issues that might arise are the choice between concrete but limited instances of an idea and abstract but universal presentations, the decision about whether to use daily experience or second-hand evidence, the complexity of the patterns of reasoning required in any particular approach, and research evidence about common misconceptions that hinder the progress of students in understanding particular concepts.

For additional information on these theoretical underpinnings, see NRC, a. Here again, depth in a teacher's subject-matter knowledge is essential. Specifically, students often believe that a push or a pull—or a force—must be due to an active, or causal, agent. With this in mind, Minstrell carefully designs his instruction, including his questions and student experiences, to help them challenge their notions as they move towards a better understanding of the scientific phenomena and explanations involved with force.

After spending time discussing and drawing the forces involved as an object is dropped to the floor, he plans questions and activities to help cultivate student understandings of more passive actions of forces so they understand that the conceptual notion of force applies to both active and passive actions and objects. His class discusses the forces involved with an object resting on a table, including the reasonableness of a table exerting an upward force.

They go over other situations that would help them decide what is happening in terms of force,. Throughout the unit, the teacher listens carefully to his students' responses and explanations. Without an understanding of both student learning and the science involved, upon hearing the proper terms from his students, he may have proceeded with his unit with the impression that the students shared a scientific understanding of force for a class transcript and analysis by the teacher, see Minstrell, The data produced from the variety of assessments illustrated in the vignettes are not only useful for the teachers but also as essential tools in helping students to realize where they stand in relation to their goals.

Thus for the students, the journals with the teacher 's comments added, serve as a repository for one form of feedback so they can maintain a continuing record of their work and progress. It is important to emphasize that assigning grades on a student' s work does not help them to grasp what it takes on their part to understand something more accurately or deeply. Comments on a student 's work that indicate specific actions to close the gap between the student's current understanding and the desired goal provide crucial help if the student takes them seriously.

There is well-researched evidence that grades on student work do not help learning in the way that specific comments do. The same research shows that students generally look only at the grades and take little notice of the comments if provided Butler, The opportunity that Ms. R's students had to design, build, and then rebuild instruments based on their trials gives them a chance to make good use of feedback to improve their piece of work. Providing information to students is not solely a cognitive exchange.

Classroom Management: Best Uses of Formative Assessments

It is intertwined with issues of affect, motivation, self-esteem, self-attribution, self-concept, self-efficacy, and one's beliefs about the nature of learning. This is the distinction between feedback that emphasizes learning goals and the associated targets and feedback that focuses on self-esteem, often linked to the giving of grades and other reward and punishment schemes. Upon comparison of feedback in experimental studies, it is the feedback about learning goals that shows better learning gains.

Feedback of the self-esteem type trying to make the student feel better, irrespective of the quality of the work leads less successful students to attribute their shortcomings to lack of ability.

The way in which information is provided is therefore a delicate matter. Grades, and even undue praise, can reinforce expectations of failure and lead to reluctance to invest effort. Yet this culture is deeply embedded in American schools and is hard to change. This fact highlights the importance of the nature and form of the information provided to students. Thus, priority should be given to providing students with information that they can use to reach desired learning goals Ames, ; Butler, ; Dweck, In helping teachers and students establish where students stand in relation to learning goals, assessment activities are not only useful during and at the end of a unit of teaching, they also can be valuable at the start of a piece of work.

Suitably open and nontechnical questions or activities can stimulate students to express how much they already know and understand about a topic. This may be particularly important when the students come from a variety of backgrounds, with some having studied aspects of the topic before, either independently or with other teachers in different schools.

Such assessment can both stimulate the thinking of the students and inform the teacher of the existing ideas and vocabularies from which the teaching has to start and on which it has to build. The following example from the Lawrence Hall of Science assessment handbook Barber et al. In this illustration, students are challenged to design and conduct two experiments to determine which of three reactants —baking soda, calcium chloride, and a phenol red solution phenol red and water —when mixed together produces heat.

The students already have completed an activity in which they mixed all three substances. The students are expected to refer to their observations and the results of that first activity. Box illustrates a data sheet used by the students for the assessment activity, which provides prompts to record their experimental design and observations. Through this investigation, the teacher would be able to assess students' abilities to do the following:. Design experiments that will provide information to help determine which reactants are necessary to produce the heat in this reaction.

Record their experiments, results, and conclusions using chemical notation as appropriate. Use experiment results and reasoning skills to draw conclusions about what causes heat. These students were able to arrive at some part of what would be a correct conclusion, though the degree to which the students used logical reasoning, or supported their conclusions with data, varied widely.

Many came up with a correct solution but featured a noncontrol, inadequate experimental design. In addition, the recording of results and observations was accomplished with varying degrees of clarity. Their responses, and the language they use to describe and explain observations and phenomena, suggest varying levels of understanding of the chemical and physical changes underlying the reactions. Because the assessment was designed primarily to tap scientific investigation and experimentation skills and understandings, other assessments, including perhaps follow-up questions, would be required to make inferences about their level of conceptual under-.

With close examination of the student work produced in this activity, teachers were able to gain insight into abilities, skills, and understandings on which they then could provide feedback to the student. It also provided the teacher with information for additional lessons and activities on chemical and physical reactions. Box , Box , Box , Box through Box offer samples of this type of student work along with teacher commentary.

Ongoing, formative assessment does not solely rely on a small-group activity structure as in the vignettes. In a whole-class discussion, teachers can create opportunities to listen carefully to student responses as they reflect on their work, an activity, or an opportunity to read aloud.

In many classrooms, for example, teachers ask students to summarize the day's lesson, highlighting what sense they made of what they did. This type of format allows the teacher to hear what the students are learning from the activity and offers other students the opportunity of learning about connections that they might not have made. In one East Palo Alto, California, classroom, the teacher asked two students at the beginning of the class to be ready to summarize their activity at the end.

The class had been studying DNA and had spent the class hour constructing a DNA model with colored paper representing different nucleotide bases. In their summary, the students discussed the pairing of nucleotide bases and held up their model to show how adenine pairs with thymine and cytosine pairs with guanine. When probed, they could identify deoxyribose and the phosphate group by color, but they were not able to discuss what roles these subunits played in a DNA helix. After hearing their remarks, the teacher realized that they needed help relating the generalizations from the model to an actual strand of DNA, the phenomenon they were modeling.

Regardless of the format —individual, small group, whole class, project-based, written, or discussion—teachers have the opportunity to build in meaningful assessment. These opportunities should be considered in curriculum design. Student participation becomes a key component of successful assessment strategies at every step: Sharing assessment with students does not mean that teachers transfer all responsibility to the student but rather that assessment is shaped and refined from day to day just as teaching is. For student self- and peer-assessment to be incorporated into regular practice requires cultivation and integration into daily classroom discourse, but the results can be well worth the effort.

A teacher can facilitate this process by providing opportunities for participation and multiple points of entry, but students actually have to take the necessary action.

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