Summative and Formative Assessment

A key principle of lesson planning is using diagnostic, ongoing, and summative assessments. Diagnostic assessment is the pre-assessment stage in which we find out what students currently know and can do. This gives us a more accurate starting point to avoid overwhelming or underwhelming them. Ongoing, or formative, assessment is finding out what they are doing well and not so well as they learn. These are checkpoints along the way, the real-time, close observations of learning. Summative assessment is putting it all (content, thinking, skills, language) together in a final performance, product, or test to show learning. Effective summative assessment offers motivates and offers direction to students. When students know what is expected of them, and it is somewhat interesting and practical, they can focus their learning to achieve language and content goals. All three of these assessment phases are important to inform how we plan our years, semesters, units, lessons, and activities.

Teachers often put the cart of instruction before the horse of assessment. We must design lessons based on what will help students to succeed on ongoing and summative assessments. The ongoing assessments are observations and check points that equip students with the knowledge and skills for summative assessments. Summative assessments are (too) often tests, mainly due to their statistical advantages, ease of scoring, and habit. But others that are gaining some ground are performances and products that resemble what content experts make and do in the real world.

Designing Performance Assessments with Language in Mind

All students need chances to use academic language, thinking, and knowledge, not just talk about them. Students might talk about different ways to solve an algebra problem or about various geographical features that influenced a culture, but the quality or lasting value of such talk may be marginal. Such knowledge may be in their heads, but it may not usable in real world ways after the test is over (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1985). Learning will endure, however, when students work together, think together, and wrestle with content and language together in construction of an authentic performance or product. As they practice with a variety of discourses for different purposes, they acquire them-and often without realizing it.

As we create effective performance and product assessments, we should design them so that they:

o Have high, clear, and real-world expectations for quality
o Allow for continual feedback from teacher and peers to improve work
o Promote reflection on content and language through discussions
o Require students to work together over a period of time that culminates in some form of public performance or shared product
o Allow students to tap into own experiences, languages, and creativity to produce their own texts and interpretations

Instructional activities can become performance assessments. We can turn graphic organizers, simulations, art-based projects, videos, web pages, compositions, and role plays into assessments. These forms of assessment tend to be more engaging-and more informative-than question-based tests. This practice smudges the line between teaching and assessment because students learn through the activity that they then do again to show their learning (with some tweaking to show their ability to apply and transform). Rarely does the real world of work give us a list of facts to memorize and questions to answer (multiple choice questions, even less so). Instead, we are asked to produce something by analyzing, transforming, synthesizing, interpreting, and communicating something. When we create a performance assessment task, we must consider how people in the real world show their proficiency in the target skills and knowledge. Consider how experts in the topic of study would think and express their learning.

Designing Rubrics

As we design performance/product assessments, we design their rubrics. Rubrics are scoring guides that describe different types of criteria for success at a performance or product (Diaz-Rico, 2004). Levels for each criteria or component are described in a table format. In designing rubrics, we must keep in mind that rubrics should: score independent traits, habits, and language separately; describe the quality of a student's use of language; be explained by using a variety of work samples that show performance differences; and use precise descriptors and indicators that enable speakers and readers to verify their scores and accurately self-assess.

Once a rubric is developed, we can go through the following stages: (1) We show examples to clarify the rubric's criteria for students; (2) students then should use rubrics to generate and self-assess their work before turning it in; (3) we offer feedback on various criteria before it is turned in; (4) students turn work in and we use the rubric to assess it; (5) we discuss strengths and weaknesses and allow students to redo aspects to improve score.

Formative Assessment

formative, assessment. It includes the “looking, listening, and commenting” that we do during class, such as checking student answers to questions, taking anecdotal notes, marking checklists, and providing helpful feedback and modeling while learning is happening. It is the “before it's too late” types of assessments that help us to help students sculpt their learning into something that guarantees success on the bigger, summative assessments at the end of a unit. During formative assessment is when the most smudging occurs of the line between assessing and teaching.

Atkin, Black, and Coffey (2001) offer three helpful questions of ongoing assessment to reflect upon with students: Where are you trying to go? Where are you now? and How can you get there? To these I add a language dimension and ask, What types of language do you need to get there? For example, I might check in a group of students who are writing up a lab report on combustion. I check to see if they have terms they might need such as activation energy, exothermic, maintain, affect, conditions, reaction, evaporation, and gases.

Minute-by-Minute Assessment of Learning

Here are several popular formative assessment techniques that allow us to get a better sense of student learning beyond just raised hands or asking if there are any questions. The main goal of these techniques is to quickly build a clear sense of student understanding and their abilities to describe it.

o Thumbs - Students put thumbs up for understanding, thumbs sideways for some understanding, and thumbs down for little understanding.
o Four fingers - Students put four fingers up or against chest to show understanding, three for less understanding, down to one finger for little understanding.
o Cards - Students put different colored cards up on their desks depending on their grasp of the material. Green can mean “let's move on” while red can mean “let's go over it again.”
o Quickwrite - Have students respond to a quick prompt and walk around to see how many of them got it or not. You can even have them use some terms in their responses to see if they comprehend the language. They can also put quick writes on cards with two different prompts on each side, and then turn the cards in to see trends of learning.
o Draw & Describe - Many students are much better at drawing their understandings than writing or talking about them. Go around as students are drawing and have students explain their drawing to you. Other students can be drawing and/or writing about their drawings.

(Condensed from Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms)