Tamara Griffith
Formative Assessments
Formative assessments are the formal and informal methods teachers use to assess students' progress over the course of a lesson or unit. This type of assessment is the manner by which I monitor student progress while students develop and practice their content knowledge and skills. Formative assessments are unique in that they often inform immediate changes in instruction based upon students' demonstrated learning and progress. As a result, this type of assessment is ongoing, allowing me to give and receive feedback that makes my instruction more effective. This interchange of feedback is crucial to the formative assessment process as it allows me to communicate evidence of progress to students, and it allows them to communicate their misconceptions and misunderstandings to me. Thus, this process allows me to effectively modify and adapt instruction to address learner needs, and this process allows students to take ownership of their learning outcomes by allowing them to reflect upon their progress and make the changes required to bolster their academic achievement.
"Checking for understanding completes the circle of assessment, planning, and instruction by providing teachers and students with evidence of learning."
~Doug Fisher & Nancy Frey
Reading Skills:
As a language arts teacher, helping my students acquire the skills they need to become proficient readers is tantamount. In order to help develop the literacy skills they need to become college and career ready, students must be able to analyze a variety of different texts. In the sample reading diagnostic, students struggled with tone and with analyzing how a writer's choice of words could reveal the author's tone. Subsequently, we completed a variety of activities that allowed me to formatively monitor learner progress toward mastery of this skill.
After analyzing the tone diagnostic data, it was clear that students were not yet ready to practice and apply content knowledge and skills related to tone independently. After explicitly teaching students tone and modeling how to determine the author's tone, students practiced and analyzed tone in collaborative groups using task cards.
Writing Skills:
I also use formative assessments when teaching students during the writing process. As assessed by the diagnostic essay, my students needed assistance and practice specifically with citing text evidence. In order to be proficient in their text-based writing at the end of the year, students will need to integrate text evidence into their essays in a variety of ways. To facilitate students' integration of text evidence, and to be responsive to the diagnostic essay data, I explicitly taught and modeled how to use the ACE strategy.
Below are some examples of how formative assessment played a role in teaching my students how to cite text evidence in their writing using the ACE strategy.
Sample Student Exit Tickets
Grammar Skills:
Formative assessments play a significant role in determining what specific grammar skills I focus on during mini-lessons. While I use the standards to determine what particular skills need to be taught over the course of the school year, often many of my students lack the prerequisite or foundational skills needed for them to successfully master the grammar standards. By conducting frequent and routine formative assessments, I can better determine which foundational skills to cover in small groups and/or mini-lessons, and I can better determine how long to spend teaching, practicing, or remediating a skill and how to differentiate for my learners.
Each day, students' do now task reinforces our grammar standards. Students are able to use their notes and/or the dictionary while they're completing their language task. While students are completing their daily language review task, I circulate the room, conducting formative assessments in the form of observational notes and/or checks for understanding. The information that I gather from this type of informal assessment is used to determine who I pull to work with in small groups, what is taught during mini-lessons, and what gets assigned and to whom on our adaptive online grammar programs, No Red Ink and Quill.
Navigate the slideshow below to explore samples of my students working on their daily language do now task.
Another way that I conduct informal assessments to determine students' understandings of grammar concepts are through exit tickets. Exit tickets provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate how well they understood the lesson and/or to reflect upon the day's learning. This allows me to make immediate adjustments to the subsequent day's lesson based on students' demonstrated strengths and areas of concern from the previous day.
To the right are sample exit tickets that some of my former students completed with regard to varying sentence structure and types of sentences. Students' exit ticket task required them to write down two things they learned and/or liked about the lesson, something they struggled with, and a question they still had with regard to sentence structure. As the students indicate in their exit tickets, which I also observed in their work, the majority of them understood the distinctions between the types of sentences, but struggled with punctuating them correctly.
In some of their exit tickets, students referred to the posters they had made in station three. On several poster papers, an image was pasted in the center along with instructions for the type of sentence students were to generate. All students were able to generate a sentence based on the inferences they had made from the picture. Analyzing the work produced from this activity (sample below) reinforced my observations and students' reflections in that many of the students' sentences had misplaced commas and/or were lacking proper punctuation. As a result, we reviewed punctuation of complex and compound sentences in a mini-lesson, and students completed additional practice on No Red Ink.
Sample Graffiti Art Posters Used as a Class-Wide Formative Assessment
Another type of formative assessment I conduct is through student homework. Each Monday, students are given homework that reinforces our grammar/ language standards, and these grammar skills are spiraled throughout the school year. This means that students will receive multiple opportunities to routinely practice a skill even after they have demonstrated proficiency, thereby promoting mastery of the material. Every Friday, students correct their own homework as I review and display the correct answers. Doing so allows students to become actively engaged in the assessment process. Because students make their own corrections, they are able to receive immediate feedback as to their performance on the assignment, which promotes students' understanding of these key grammar skills. Additionally, many students often ask questions about their responses to their homework, which allows me to provide more descriptive feedback to better support their needs. As a result, I gain insight into students' content knowledge, allowing me to make informed decisions to best support students' instructional needs. Reviewing students' homework also allows me to determine whether or not I need to enrich or remediate a given skill.
Explore samples of student-corrected homework below.
Analyzing these samples gives me keen insights into my students' proficiency with certain grammar skills. For example, in looking at these students' samples, all of them missed some of the questions relating to verb tenses, particularly the perfect verb tenses. Additionally, most of them struggled with distinguishing between complex and compound sentences. While nearly all of them recognized that possessive noun questions required them to add an apostrophe to sentences, many of them struggled with apostrophe placement. As a result, I would emphasize, reteach, and give students additional practice with these skills to ensure mastery of these skills.
ACE Strategy Guided Modeling Sample
In order to help my students become proficient writers, I have them begin citing text evidence using the ACE strategy, which calls for students to answer the question, cite text evidence, and explain and elaborate their answer. After explicitly teaching students the three components of this strategy and reading several examples, we read a short passage about storms and, as a class, developed a short answer response in which we integrated text evidence. Here, I modeled the application of this strategy by using a think aloud depicting how to transition from one step of the ACE strategy to the next. Doing so helped guide my learners through the process of integrating text evidence in their own writing. Afterwards, students color-coded each part of the strategy so that they could clearly see how each step played a role in the integration of text evidence. This also served as a visual scaffold to assist learners in their subsequent applications of this skill.
Student Sample 1
Student Sample 2
Student Sample 3
All three students struggled with the third step of integrating text evidence: explain and elaborate, which was a class-wide trend. As a result, future instruction will focus specifically on ways for students to elaborate and extend their analysis. Doing so will allow students to achieve our classroom big goals and to become more proficient in applying critical thinking skills in their writing. Additionally, many students are still forgetting to add citations, although, for the most part, they are otherwise citing correctly. A few students are beginning their paragraphs with sentence frames, forgetting to turn the question into a statement before adding their answer. As a result, I will need to pull those students in small groups in future instruction.
Prior to giving students an additional formative assessment, I reviewed each step of the ACE strategy using the short answer questions from the Freak the Mighty chapter 1 analysis questions above. I typed up some examples of both low and high quality responses to these questions so that students could discuss and identify high quality written responses, which would guide their progress toward creating high quality written responses as well. Doing so not only reinforced my expectations, but also ensured that students had more examples of high quality writing that demonstrated mastery of this skill. As a result, the majority of students were able to improve their integration of text evidence, as evidenced in students' short answer responses to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi below.
In the student work samples to the right, students are clearly improving their ability to integrate text evidence. For the most part, students' errors are only minor. They have been utilizing their sentence frames and graphic organizers, and so some of them used transition words from their sentence frames that did not quite fit the context of their responses. Thus, for some students, I will need to review some of the vocabulary of the sentence frames to ensure that students are utilizing them correctly in subsequent assessments.
In addition, these student work samples also demonstrate another type of formative assessment strategy that I use: exit tickets. Exit tickets allow students to synthesize their knowledge from the lesson and provide a reflection that makes them think about their thinking and learning, thereby reinforcing some of the Habits of Mind. Formatively assessing students through the use of exit tickets actively engages my learners in the assessment process as it allows them to communicate with me exactly how and what they have learned. This provides me with clear feedback that allows me to adjust the lesson for the subsequent day based upon the demonstrated needs and reflections of my learners.
Interactive Exit Ticket Example
While some exit tickets are embedded within students' independent practice, not all exit tickets are administered in this fashion. Sometimes, students complete their exit tickets interactively. For example, have reviewing students' written responses to the Rikki-Tikki-Tavi questions, I posed two reflection questions about citing text evidence on the board. Students answered these questions on a post-it note before sticking it on the board. After each class period, I removed the sticky notes and quickly sorted them into a "Got it" and a "Needs Help" pile. This allowed me to quickly monitor learner progress and reassess how I want to teach the subsequent day's lesson. Doing so allows me to determine if, how, and where I need to make modifications to my instructional plan.
Below are samples of students' interactive exit tickets and my formative assessment process that guides my instructional decision-making process.
Sample Exit Ticket Sort
Reading Skills:
For this particular assignment, students were grouped according to their FSA levels and performance on the tone diagnostic assessment. While every group was given all twenty-four task cards, the number of cards that each group was expected to complete prior to getting their answers scored differed. For example, my high-performers had to answer all of the questions prior to checking their answers, whereas my struggling learners, special education students, and English language learners got their answers checked every time they answered six questions. This allowed me to appropriately chunk the task, which is an accommodation for several of my learners, and also allowed me to provide timely and effective feedback to learners about their progress as it was needed.
While students were working, I circulated the room, stopping at each group to check for understanding and clarify any misconceptions that arose. As each group completed their set of task cards, I scored them on the spot. If their answer was incorrect, the number was circled and they were given a second attempt. Once they completed their second attempt, I scored their answers again. This time, I put a check mark to indicate incorrect responses or a C to indicate correct responses. Groups with time remaining were allowed to try a third attempt. This allowed students to get immediate feedback and allowed me to quickly assess how well students could identify tone. Samples of groups' scoring sheets are included below.
Group 1 Score Sheet
FSA Level 1s
Group 2 Score Sheet
FSA Level 3s
Group 3 Score Sheet
FSA Level 4s
Student Sample 1
Student Sample 2
In analyzing students' work, I noticed that those students who went back into the text and found text evidence to support or prove their answers were able to more accurately assess the tone of a passage and thus were closer to mastery of this learning goal. About 68% of students highlighted or underlined text evidence that revealed the author's tone and scored an 80% or above on this formative assessment. In order to move students forward and toward analyzing how specific word choice affects and/or reveals tone, students will need to be able to identify where in the text the author's tone is developed or revealed. As a result, I modified their quiz to include the evidence piece to ensure that students were adequately working toward their rigorous learning goals and to ensure that this formative assessment was aligned to the standard. (The previous version of this formative assessment, which was not administered this year, did not include the boxes for students to list the evidence that revealed the tone.) Samples of students' completed tone quiz are included below.
Student Sample 1 - Front
Student Sample 1 - Back
After completing the quiz on identifying tone and citing text evidence, 87% of the class demonstrated proficiency. Most students incorrectly answered the question regarding informal tone. Because many students also made errors with formal and informal tone in their writing diagnostics as well, I will need to explicitly teach formal versus informal tone in subsequent lessons as that skill affects not only students' mastery of this standard, but also affects whether or not students' writing is consider to be on grade level.
Because, overall, students were able to adequately determine tone and select the appropriate evidence that revealed the author's tone, students were ready to begin analyzing how their text evidence revealed the author's tone. In the samples below, which are the same format as students' diagnostic assessment for this skill, students' mastery and understanding of the content is evident.
In addition, by comparing students' data from this formative assessment to their diagnostic assessment results, I was able to determine that students' analyses were much more thoughtful and correct than in their initial assessment. By analyzing students' progress through formative assessments, I was able to develop the necessary scaffolds in order to improve and document students' proficiencies with this key reading skill.
Students Working on Tone Task Cards in Collaborative Groups
In examining students' performance across groups, it is clear that some questions, such as 7, 8, 10, 17, and 20 were problematic for students regardless of whether they were significantly below grade level (Level 1s), on grade level (Level 3s), or above grade level (Level 4s). While students who were above grade level typically answered these questions correctly in their second attempt, students who were below or on grade level sometimes answered these questions correctly on the second attempt, and sometimes they remained incorrect even despite a third attempt. In reviewing the questions themselves (which were purchased here), I realized that students' errors may stem from ignorance of tone vocabulary and not from a deficiency with this skill.
To support student learning, I decided to spend a day reviewing key tone vocabulary. Typically, I use the Frayer model graphic organizer when teaching key vocabulary because it organizes key ideas and knowledge about a word's meaning into different categories that help my students, especially my English Language Learners and special education students, truly know and understand a word's definition. Because students' prerequisite tone vocabulary varied immensely, students were given a categorized list of tone words below. Although all students were given the same list of tone words, this task was differentiated through student choice.
Student completes a Frayer model graphic organizer to define tone words.
Student uses a dictionary to look up definitions of tone works to facilitate completion of a Frayer model graphic organizer. Students were also encouraged to use my Chromebooks or their own devices to look up tone vocabulary.
This image depicts a third student's completed Frayer model graphic organizer for tone words. Because all of the words this student chose began with the letter A, I infer that he/she has limited knowledge of tone vocabulary, meaning that I will need to spend more time working with him/her in expanding his/her tone word vocabulary.
Student completes a Frayer model graphic organizer to define tone words.
After modeling how to complete a Frayer model graphic organizer using the problematic tone vocabulary from the tone task cards, students were able to choose one positive, one neutral, one negative, and one other tone word from the list on the left for which they completed a Frayer Model. Students receiving accommodations were able to work with a peer and/or in small groups to facilitate their completion of this task. As students finished their Frayer models, they taught their tone words to other students in the class, thereby increasing the class's collective exposure and knowledge of key tone vocabulary.
Navigate the slideshow below to explore the ways in which my students worked with tone vocabulary and Frayer models to increase their understanding of key tone vocabulary and to explore samples of completed students' work.
Having a strong background in tone vocabulary is crucial for students to be able to successfully determine author's tone as it allows students to pick up on the more subtle nuances in the meanings of words. However, in order for students to meet the rigor of the standard, they will need to move beyond merely identifying and determining the author's tone; this particular standard requires students to also analyze how specific word choice affects and/or reveals an author's tone.
To this end, students were given the practice below. The directions of this formative assessment did not explicitly require students to go back and find the text evidence that supported or revealed the author's tone. As a result, I utilized this formative assessment to determine which students inherently found text evidence to support their answers and which ones did not. Doing so allowed me to not only evaluate learner progress, but also determine what additional supports and scaffolds my students needed.
The first student sample represents a regular student who does not receive accommodations. The second student sample represents special education students and English language learners. Students receiving accommodations on this formative assessments had their questions and answer choices read aloud, sentence frames taped to their desks, and extended time. The final student sample represents an advanced students' work.
As indicated by the scores students received on this assessment, 100% of students achieved an 80% or above, indicated class mastery of this standard. As shown in the feedback provided, students lost points most often for not going back and coding the text, which is a skill I will reinforce in subsequent learning. By analyzing the data from this formative assessment, I was able to verify how and where mastery and student learning had occurred.
Since we generated the content for this example paragraph as a class, I was able to make observational notes, another type of formative assessment, as to which students were struggling with each part of the ACE strategy. This allowed me to better target specific students during independent practice for check-ins and/or small group instruction. As a result, I was able to more efficiently and immediately target students of concern.
Navigate the slideshow below to explore how my students interacted with this strategy in a subsequent formative assessments. Here, students answered short answer questions using the ACE strategy to analyze chapter one of Freak the Mighty.
Students use their ACE strategy foldable and sentence frames to improve their integration of text evidence while they complete short answer questions for chapter 1 of Freak the Mighty.
Students use their ACE strategy foldable and sentence frames to improve their integration of text evidence while they complete short answer questions for chapter 1 of Freak the Mighty.
Students use their ACE strategy foldable and sentence frames to improve their integration of text evidence while they complete short answer questions for chapter 1 of Freak the Mighty.
Overall, utilizing multiple methods of formative assessments, such as checks for understanding, observational notes, independent practice, and exit tickets, allows me to effectively monitor students' progress toward meeting the learning goals associated with text-based writing. Some of these varied methods, such as exit tickets, actively engage learners in assessing their progress toward understanding and mastery of key skills associated with integrating text evidence and text-based writing. By conducting a variety of formative assessments throughout students' writing instruction, I can more accurately verify and document what students have learned about the text-based writing process so that I can effectively decide how to best support them in their mastery of this skill.
Students use dictionaries to help them answer grammar questions.
Students use dictionaries to help them answer grammar questions.
Students use dictionaries to help them answer grammar questions.
Often, students complete grammar-related assignments on adaptive programs, which include No Red Ink and Quill. Because these programs are adaptive, the assignments students complete are personalized. Students can complete and master topics at their own pace, and/or they can complete the formative assessments I assign. While students complete their individualized assignments and practice on these programs, I circulate the room, checking in with students by asking them questions to check for understanding and reviewing key concepts as needed. Listen to the clip below to hear a sample student check-in to review sentence structure, particularly with compound sentences.
All in all, formative assessments allow me to determine how my students are performing during and throughout the learning process. Making frequent and varied formative assessments allows me to make instructional adjustments that cater to students' demonstrated levels of proficiency, fortifying their strengths and growing their weaknesses. This allows me to be more responsive as a teacher and accommodate my students varied needs. Once students have demonstrated proficiency on formative assessments, they are ready to apply their content knowledge in a summative assessment.
In the sound clip above, I think through how to answer a particular question with a student. She had been struggling with this type of question, so I decided to intervene and review this concept with her. Here, I ask her probing questions that make her thinking and understanding visible. This allows me to accurately verify and determine whether or not she understood this skill. This student was able to accurately assess that the sentence was not a complex sentence because it did not have an AAAWWUBBIS word, but made the incorrect inference that only compound sentences have a comma. As a result, I continued to ask her a probing question, requiring her to review her notes before (correctly) stating that compound sentences need a conjunction in addition to a comma. Based upon this formative assessment, I know that I will need to work with this student on parts of speech, particularly with verbs and helping verbs, to facilitate her mastery of more complex grammatical concepts.