How to Use Formative Assessment to Accelerate Learning
-
Loading... - Muinaga keisha
- 04 May 2023
- 94 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
Teachers usually can’t use standardized tests to accelerate students’ learning. The tests are often too general and the results too slow in coming to help teachers make daily instructional decisions. To keep students on pace with grade-level content while also filling in holes from disrupted learning, it’s crucial for teachers to integrate daily measures of student understanding—often known as formative assessment.
How do you distinguish between diagnostic assessment versus formative assessment? And how should teachers be using those two?
I personally tend to get nervous about the word “diagnostic,” because I think it often implies a level of certainty and a level of finality. We’re not diagnosing a disease; we are identifying what is right now a gap of understanding that we can help to fill.
I think it is important to think about formative assessments as not just those formalized pencil-and-paper forms, but all of the strategies that teachers employ in the classroom to understand, in the moment, what students want to do, what they’re ready to work on next, and how to best provide them with the kinds of instruction or the approaches that will help get them there. Formative assessment is the linchpin of all that. Read More…
