Session 3 - Assessment

The skill of "bubble guessing" as Diane Ravitch recently called it during a lecture at my alma mater, is not very in demand in the working world. Yet that is what our schools have as their central focus because of the current requirements from our government. In this session of my Capstone course I am being tasked with looking at assessment.



For those of you who are uneducated about the ways of education, their are two basic kinds of assessment. The first is the one that most people think of when they think of assessment and it is called summative assessment. These are things like end of unit tests, the SAT, final exams, and even quizzes. The second kind of assessment is called formative. Formative assessments are not supposed to count in the gradebook. They are assessments made as students work towards mastery of information and skills.



According to Catherine Garrison & Michael Ehringhaus in the article, "Formative and Summative Assessments in the Classroom," “Summative assessments happen too far down the learning path to provide information at the classroom level and to make instructional adjustments and interventions during the learning process.” Now I disagree with the first part of their statement about summative assessments not providing information at the classroom level. I think they do provide valuable feedback on a teachers instruction. I do agree with their point that summative assessments happen too late for the teacher to do anything about it. At this point most teachers are moving on. If things are really bad they might reteach certain concepts. If only they had used better formative assessments they might have recognized their errors earlier and prevented the reteaching in the first place.



Our same authors argue that formative assessment should not count in the gradebook because when the early formative assessments, which happen when students are still grasping concepts, are averaged with the higher scores that come towards the end of an instructional time period the resulting average does not adequately reflect the students learning. Particularly if that student demonstrates strong mastery of a subject by scoring well on the final formative assessment.



So what makes good formative assessment? According to our authors it is descriptive assessment aka giving students lots of feedback. The authors suggest goal setting, observations, questioning strategies, self and peer assessment, and student record keeping as some ways to promote formative assessment. My issue with descriptive/formative assessment is that it can be very time consuming in an environment that is seriously pressed for time.



I like both kinds of assessment and when done correctly they can paint an excellent picture of a students actual academic achievement.