What are Formative Assessments?
Formative assessment is another buzz word that is heard in the education profession. However, many people miss the mark when it comes to understanding exactly what formative assessments are and how to implement them effectively.
The easiest way to define formative assessment is to understand that the emphasis is on how students are moving through the learning process. Most people equate the word assessment as a check on a student's mastery of a skill or concept. There are assessments that are designed for this purpose, but those are summative assessments.
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Effective formative assessments are short, quick checkpoints as learning is taking place in order to see if students are ready to move forward with the lesson or will need additional time with the current learning objective. This can be vital as learning objectives often build off of prior skills. If the students have not mastered the prior skills, moving forward with the lesson may cause misconception or frustrations in the acquisitions of the new skills.
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This can all be avoided with built in checkpoints to gauge the level of understanding of what has just been taught throughout the learning objective.
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Why Use Formative Assessments?
As expectations increase in our classrooms, time is a major factor in ensuring students will meet those expectations. Most approaches involve students going through entire lessons, taking a summative assessment, then going back and reteaching the skills that performed poorly. This can eat up much instructional time, in most cases doubling the allocated time for a particular skill or objective.
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Formative assessments allow for frequent checkpoints along the way, allowing the teacher to catch issues students are having at the time of instruction. Waiting until a summative assessment to reteach skills can get quite overwhelming, especially if students developed a misconception very early in the learning objective. Misconceptions can build upon each other leading to the teacher having to either reteach the entire learning objective, or worse, moving on to the next concept for lack of time to reteach.
What Makes Lennections Formative Assessments Unique?
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Assesslet items are aligned to the Georgia Standards of Excellence (GSE) and include the rigor and DOK levels needed to ensure reliable data and feedback.
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State resources, such as assessment guides, achievement level descriptors, and scoring samples, were used when creating Assesslets to determine the format for items to best prepare students for state assessments.
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Each selected-response item is associated with an answer key. The answer keys provide the correct answer for each selected-response item, as well as rationales which contain explanations for both the correct and incorrect choices. Rationales provide clarity around common misconceptions in the student’s thinking for incorrect choices.
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Constructed and extended responses on Assesslets are hand scored by professionally trained Raters.
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Assesslets provide administrators, teachers and students easy to understand, color-coded reports. Teacher and student reports include full access to passages, questions, correct responses, rationales, GSE, DOK and Lexile levels, rubrics, exemplars, personalized feedback and standards analysis.
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Assesslets provide results and reports quickly. Selected response items are automatically scored, while written responses are scored in 6 days or less.
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Assesslets were designed to be user friendly, administered in one class session, and used to drive whole and small group instruction.
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Lennections also offers administrators and teachers in-platform live support.
