Author: Daniel Mogyorosi

Lastly, one of the most important parts of feedback is when, and how you implement it. The only way students can improve in their learning, is if they have someone to interpret their work, and share with them effective strategies for them to continue learning. As Bruner said back in 1970, “learning depends on knowledge of results, at a time when, and at a place where, the knowledge can be used for correction.”

Lets unpack that a bit. “Learning depends on knowledge of results”: meaning that its not enough to just learn something, students have to then learn from the results of their actions. “At a time when, and a place where, the knowledge can be used for correction”: its not enough for students to learn, or even to be told how to improve on their learning, that all needs to happen at a time and place in which they are ready for it.

This table from Sharon Gedye’s article “Formative assessment and feedback: a review” shows Sadler’s six resources for effective formative feedback.

Gedye goes on to give some more ways to improve the quality of your feedback. She says that your feedback should be presented as soon as you can after the assignment, and should be as directly relevant to the work as possible. Additionally, the feedback should not just be about the strengths and weaknesses of the work, but also include ways to improve on the work. This feedback should also be minimal, so students do not get overwhelmed and can prioritize in the most important space.

 

One thing that is very important for the implementation of Formative Assessment, is the language you use to report your feedback to the students. To this end I wanted to look into some effective language use to communicate feedback.

One really important point that I have seen discussed in numerous different places, is effective and proper use of praise. Historically, praise was often used to uplift a student on their achievements and show them the accurately completed their goals. This lead to an interesting problem, in which students began to care a lot more about the receiving praise, than growing and learning. Students who are told “Wow good job, you are so smart”, are unlikely to continue trying to solve more difficult problems for fear of failure. This is called a Performance Avoidance Mindset. These are students who perform exclusively for extrinsic motivation; they want to be told they are smart, again and again. If they are forced to work hard on something in order to complete it, and do not receive the praise they were expecting or hoping for, they are unlikely to try again. And that makes sense. It also makes sense that if you are giving Assessment OF Learning, it is very likely you will give this kind of feedback; the student either did well or poorly, nothing else matters.

However, if you instead say “Wow great effort, you worked so hard and this [insert specific example] part of your assignment was really great because of [insert specific reason]”, you are going to get a very different response from your student. This response is doing two very important things differently that the first example. One is very obvious, and that is the specificity of the feedback. Your assessment is showing that you really focused on something the student did well. The student can tell that you really cared about their efforts. And on the topic of effort, that is the second great part of this feedback. The emphasis on praise of effort over achievement has been shown to increase further growth and encourage a Growth Mindset, or a Mastery Approach Mindset. These students are highly likely to try something more difficult, or beyond their immediate skill level because they believe it really doesn’t matter whether or not they succeed, what matters is that they try their best and work hard.

Of course this is not enough and it is important to inform students of how they can improve. At this point though, when you have a student who is already in the mindset of being prepared to learn and improve, any constructive feedback you give is more likely to be accepted as constructive and to reflect on it to improve.

This is just one example of a way to use appropriate language for student feedback. There are many many things to remember when reporting to students.

Here are a few links to sites that discuss this problem:

http://www.nea.org/tools/52080.htm

https://www.teachingchannel.org/video/positive-feedback-to-students

https://www.teachingchannel.org/video/building-student-confidence

One of the most important points in the introduction of Formative assessment was its evolution from what came before it. For many years education was run off a system of Summative Assessment.

Summative Assessment is also known as Assessment OF Learning. This is a pretty easy way of undertanding what Summative assessment is. It is generally a way of assessing student learning through their final assignments of tests. This is a very useful technique is a few ways. It is absolutely useful when making a final decision of whether or not a student has accomplished a goal.

However, after years of exclusively assessing student work in this way, it became clear that this was not optimal. The main problem with Summative Assessment is that there is very minimal constructive feedback throughout the learning. As a result, by the time students receive their feedback, there is no room or time to improve on what they have been told. If the term/year is over, how as students supposed to take their feedback and learn from it?

That is where Formative Assessment comes in. A second way of thinking about Formative Assessment is as Assessment FOR Learning. Again, this name says a lot. It was created specifically with the goal of filling in the holes that Summative Assessment left, i.e. assessing and providing feedback for students with the intention of allowing them to learn from and improve on their work and learning.

This is a picture from the book “Classroom Assessment for Student Learning” by Rick Stiggins, Judith Arter, and Jan and Steve Chappuis. It is a table showing the differences between Assessment FOR Learning and Assessment OF Learning.

 

In order to work on my understanding of formative assessment, I decided that a good place to start is with what I already know in order to see where I can go from there.

To that end, here are some things I know already about the topic:

1. Formative Assessment describes a method of assessing student work with the goal of ongoing improvement in mind.
2. It is meant to be a long term process, rather than a single response at the end of a unit
3. It is closely tied to the backwards design for learning in which units and lessons are designed from the final goal back to the start with the intention of leading students clearly to their goals.
4. Formative assessment should involve reporting to students’ parents in order to receive help from them in encouraging their children towards the students’ goals
5. Formative Assessment can appear in many different forms
   1. It can be in the form of an oral conversation with the student, that is later recorded.
   2. It can be in the form of comments made on an assignment returned with instructions for revisions, or additional work to aid in practice

I am thankful to have had so much time in the last few years to focus on and break down the basic aspects of Formative Assessment. However, I am fully aware that there are many places where I want to increase my understanding. My last point about the many forms of Formative Assessment is specifically a place where I will focus.

For now, I will bring in some learning from  the book “Outstanding Formative Assessment” by Shirley Clarke.

The first section of the book focuses on the setting up of a learning environment in which formative assessment will be effective. Clarke suggests investing time into fostering a space in which students are encouraged to maintain a growth mindset. This works in a loop with formative assessment, and is the student’s main way to cooperate in the improvement of their learning. If a student is open and ready to learn, then the teacher’s suggestions and feedback will be more readily received.

Additionally Clarke suggests involving students in the planning phase of instruction. This includes both the content of units as well as, importantly, the creation of criteria. Student involvement in the creation of criteria is essential to the learning of students after they have completed assignments. If students are fully aware, before beginning their work, of exactly what is expected of them, then they are more open to constructive feedback after completion. They can more clearly see in conjunction with their criteria, where they can improve and move forward with their learning.

 

So that is some base information on what Formative Assessment is. In the next post I will discuss the difference between Assessment FOR Learning and Assessment OF Learning.

Hi all,

The purpose of this blog is to explore formative assessment and specifically my final goal is to learn a few strategies around ways to report back to my students with effective formative feedback.

To do this I will be using some books that I have gathered over the last few years as well as my own experiences in classrooms.

I hope you stick around to see how this goes.

For the sake of this activity, I felt it was pertinent to make a post just saying a little bit about myself and my context.

As a student teacher, or teacher in training, I am a very excited to push forward through my education to learn more and more that can evolve and change my practice. My passion for teaching is my biggest drive in this. I enjoy every part of being a teacher in a classroom, and the idea that I can learn about becoming more effective at this is wonderful to me.

This activity is meant for me to share some of my education learning with my peers and others. I hope you are able to take something from here that you didn’t have when you arrived, if you are not, then leave a comment to share with me your thoughts.

Thank you,

-Daniel