Assessment for Learning
21st Century Skills: Moving Children Forward
Strategies for Student Success
Strategy 2: Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning.
Strategy 3: Providing feedback that moves learners forward.
Strategy 4: Activating students as learning resources for one another.
Strategy 5: Activating students as owners of their own learning.
The "why" behind the "what"
WHAT: Assessment is the measurement of what students are learning. Students' achievement is defined by how well they have mastered certain target skills. Assessments provide educators with both objective and subjective data in order to ascertain student progress and skill mastery.
WHY: Information from assessments helps teachers determine which instructional approaches are best for certain students, what their students may already know about a given topic, and what subjects needs to be retaught.
Formative & Summative
Formative: Given throughout the learning process, formative assessments seek to determine how students are progressing through a certain learning goal.
This kind of assessment should be used to guide your instruction; poor performance on tested material provides educators the opportunity to review the material and adjust teaching methods.
Putting it all together
- Formative assessments can be informal and used as checkpoints throughout the instructional process. Either through the use or oral questioning or informal quizzes, formative assessments can be useful throughout the unit.
- If the teacher administered a pretest at the beginning of the unit, a summative assessment provides insight into whether the teaching methods were effective. If little progress has been made, the teacher can modify their methods in moving forward to new material.