Formative Assessment
The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and
by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments: Help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work. Help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately Formative assessments are generally low stakes, which means that they have low or no point value. Examples of formative assessments include asking students to: submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a science project or a science experiment comparing animal cells and plants cells. |
Summative Assessment
The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.
Summative assessments are often high stakes, which means that they have a high point value. Examples of summative assessments include: - a midterm exam - a final science project - a essay for a science experiment Information from summative assessments can be used formatively when students or faculty use it to guide their efforts and activities in subsequent courses. The goal of assessment is to improve student learning. Although grading can play a role in assessment, assessment also involves many ungraded measures of student learning. Moreover, assessment goes beyond grading by systematically examining patterns of student learning across courses and programs and using this information to improve educational practices. |
Using Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)
a set of specific activities that instructors can use to quickly gauge students’ comprehension. They are generally used to assess students’ understanding of material in the current course, but with minor modifications they can also be used to gauge students’ knowledge coming into a course or program.
CATs
are meant to provide immediate feedback about the entire class’s level of understanding, not individual students’. The instructor can use this feedback to inform instruction, such as speeding up or slowing the pace of a lecture or explicitly addressing areas of confusion.
Asking Appropriate Questions in CATs
Examples of appropriate questions you can ask in the CAT format:
how familiar are students with important names, elements, events in history that they will need to know as background in order to understand the lectures and readings.
how are students applying knowledge and skills learning in this class to their own lives?
to what extent are students aware of the steps they go through in solving problems and how well can they explain their problem-solving steps
how well are students using a learning approach that is new to them to master the concepts and principles in this course?
Authentic Assessment
A form of assessment in which students are asked to perform real-world tasks that demonstrate meaningful application of essential knowledge
and skills. An authentic assessment usually includes a task for students to perform and a rubric by which their performance on the task will be evaluated.
Comparing Traditional and Authentic Assessments
Traditional ----------------------------------------------------------------- Authentic
Selecting a Response ------------------------------------ Performing a Task
Contrived ------------------------------------------------------------------- Real-life
Recall/Recognition --------------------------------- Construction/Application
Teacher-structured ----------------------------------------- Student-structured
Indirect Evidence ----------------------------------------------- Direct Evidence