Prior
to this quarter, I have had limited practice using standards-based assessment,
especially as it pertains to formative assessment. Having taken courses on
instructional strategies, I have learned about various formative assessments,
but not really how to incorporate it into an overall unit structure. Through
this quarter, we have seen the value of formative assessment and how to
incorporate this in our unit plans. We began looking through Embedded
Formative Assessment (Wiliam, 2011) and creating our learning progression.
This
process of looking through the trajectory of a unit and determining what the steps
in the progression of learning looks like was a new task, particularly laying
it out in some sort of format other than just looking through the book or
curriculum provided. For me, this represented a start to really looking deeply
at the focus standards of a unit and laying out what each step in reaching that
standard looks like. My learning progression (Learning Progression) began as
a rather well-defined process to get from one step to another, however, I was
not sure how to determine whether my students had learned the material. I was
afraid that my assessment of student understanding would not tell me what
students had learned, similar to the story of Jy (Wiliam, 2011, p. 47). Through
feedback provided by my peers, I was able to create formative assessments that
I believe will be beneficial in correctly determining where my students are at
in the progression. We then looked at ways to incorporate peer and self-assessment
into the learning. This was once again aided by feedback received by peers and
the professor and the opportunities that I have provided, I believe, are
quality and will help me and my students a great deal to gauge learning.
The
other major area we looked at was through our assessment into action paper. For
this, I decided to research how to provide quality feedback to my students.
This was a focus because I feel like I have either provided feedback that is
too specific and does not really require thought to figure out, or too vague
and is not useful in helping my students get to the next level of their
learning. In order to figure out how to provide useful formative assessment, I found
some good resources that allowed me a bit of insight into what it means to
provide quality feedback. One of the articles I found provided some great
information with a quote, “Feedback functions formatively only if the information fed back to the learner is used by the learner
in improving performance” (Wiliam, 2012, p.120, emphasis in original). This
quote really struck me because I had not come to the realization that it does
not matter what sort of feedback I provide if it is not useful to help students
improve their understanding. In my paper, (Assessment Into Action), I looked through
several different resources, mainly articles by a couple authors, Dylan Wiliam
and Susan Brookhart. Both authors have similar approaches to providing feedback
which boil down to about three elements; feedback occurs while students are
learning, feedback is appropriate for the understanding of a student (not too
high or too low), and feedback must be used by students. One more element that
I really had not thought about was provided by Brookhart (2012), where she
asserts that feedback, “can’t work if students don’t have an immediate
opportunity to use it” (p. 26). This was another element of new learning for me
as I did not really think about immediate practice being necessary to build
learning (although this seems a bit naïve now). The elements necessary for
feedback to be high quality and effective are really informative and important
to my practice moving forward.
This
course really helped out with my approach to assessment, particularly formative
assessment. We were constantly working with program standard 11, utilize
formative and summative assessment in a standards based environment. This work is
really important for me in becoming the teacher I want to be and will have a
high level of impact on my practice moving forward. I will be able to utilize
this information in any class and at any level. Overall, this class has
provided me with a great deal of information to help improve my teaching, my
analysis of where students are in their understanding, and ways that I can
provide feedback to students to help them improve their understanding.
Ultimately, my students will reap the benefit of this shift in approach as they
will be able to build on their understanding far more independently than they
could previously.
Brookhart, S. (2012).
Preventing feedback fizzle. Educational Leadership, 70(1), 24-29.
Wiliam, D.
(2011). Embedded formative assessment. Solution
Tree Press, Bloomington, In.
Wiliam, D.
(2012). Feedback: Part of a system. Educational Leadership, 70(1),
31-34.
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