There's more to Formative Assessment then meets the eye

To be honest, I wasn't paying much attention. I don't know what lead to the question in class, but I heard the professor say "Who knows the difference between formative and summative assessment?" No one responds.

This is a topic that I tend to think about a lot. I want to know if I'm getting through to my students before I have to grade them on it. I'm always hoping to do a better a job with formative assessments in my classrooms, so that I can feel like I've done every thing I can (in the 5 hours I'll see these students) to help them succeed on their work samples. So, I'm pretty familiar with the topic.

I raise my hand, and give a response: "Formative assessment is on-going. Its when you check in with your students during class and try to get a feel for what they're understanding or what you need to clarify. Summative assessments are at the end; the tests and papers that are graded to see what they retained." My definition wasn't complete enough for him, but he said it got an "A". That was his own formative assessment - he was telling me, you have the idea, but there's more to learn - pay attention.

So how else can I use formative assessments? Not just asking the students to answer a question or list the forces of flight and seeing who can recall it. What else can I do in my classroom now?

One of the activities that is usually part of my class is on the last day when students are finishing up their work samples. I have two or three of them come forward and read their Experiment Procedures. While they read what they've written in their rough draft, I mime their actions, setting up and doing the experiment exactly as they've described. This is a great tool when the first one or two are really bad. When they're good, its harder to use as a tool.

"Another distinction that underpins formative assessment is student involvement. If students are not involved in the assessment process, formative assessment is not practiced or implemented to its full effectiveness. Students need to be involved both as assessors of their own learning and as resources to other students." Catherine Garrison & Michael Ehringhaus, "Formative and Summative Assessments in the Classroom"

Are my students a tool I'm using (asking them questions and gauging their responses verse what I want/expect) or are they also benefiting from the assessments? During those demonstrations, they're helping each other, they can watch each other, listen to each other, and offer advice. It's a technique that works, it involves the student and it gives them a fair opportunity to review their draft before completing the assignment. What about other times in my lesson plans - do I offer more opportunities when they can assess themselves and each other, or do I wait for them to regurgitate information to see if it stuck?

"..[F]ormative assessment occurs when teachers feed information back to students in ways that enable the student to learn better, or when students can engage in a similar, self-reflective process." Staff, FairTest; "The value of formative assessment"

Not as easy as we want it to be.