How to Enhance Learning Through Formative Assessment & Feedback

Formative assessment is a valuable tool in a teacher's kit because it allows you to give your students feedback throughout the term and help them as they progress toward their goals in any particular unit. Formative assessment is anything you do to assess or test your students' levels of understanding about a subject while they are still learning that subject; it could be a quiz, an oral question-and-answer session, a paper, or a group presentation. Using formative assessment and feedback gives your students time to pause and evaluate their performances before they reach major assessments.

• 1

  Provide some type of feedback at least every other day. Give your students small opportunities to demonstrate what they have learned and let them know whether or not they are on the right track. Hold question-and-answer sessions at the beginning of a class period, or give students a quick three-question mini-quiz at the end of a lesson; you can also put students into collaborative groups and have them list what they know about the topic they are studying. Brief, frequent feedback gives students the chance to speak up if they get lost, alleviating misunderstanding or confusion before it becomes overwhelming to them.

• 2

  Assign students small, graded opportunities to demonstrate what they have learned; do this on a regular basis. Give a homework assignment that reviews the day's materials. Put a pop vocabulary quiz on the board to start a class. Ask students to write a paragraph explaining a topic. These small formative assessments give you a chance to evaluate the progress of your students' understanding of a topic, and they also add grades to an overall class grade, so if a student doesn't do well on one assignment it will not seriously impact his course grade.

• 3

  Set up time to hold individual student conferences. Give students a formative assessment, such as a quiz or a small writing assignment, and then meet with each pupil to go over the results of that assessment. Giving verbal feedback is often faster than writing out comments for every student, and it gives students an opportunity to ask questions and talk to you about what they do and do not understand.

• 4

  Give one assessment multiple times. A diagnostic test is an assessment that evaluates a student's current level of understanding about a topic. If you give that same test at the beginning of a new learning unit and then again at key points during the unit, students can use the scores they earned on each assessment to measure their progress. This gives them feedback about what they have learned and what they still need to master before the unit is over.

• 5

  Use rubrics with your assessments. A rubric is a document that outlines your expectations for an assignment, and it also explains to a student the level of understanding he should have about the topic. A rubric helps you categorize an assignment's requirements, and it helps students quickly and easily see their strengths and weaknesses on a particular assignment based on the rubric scores they earned.