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Assessments for learning tap into the depths of knowledge by providing time-bound activities that are linked to the students' comprehension. It assess the students individually even within group projects.

Example: Teacher assigns checkpoints to assess the learning. Students complete the following as checkpoints:

Exit cards/ tickets

Reflection journals

Checklist reflections

Non-graded quizzes

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John McCarthy

Education Consultant, Advocate for Student Voice in Learning

Whenever announcing group or team assessments, the typical response by students and parents is "Groan." Even parents who are teachers do the same. Individual assessments are missing in teamwork. Group assessments are useful for managing a large number of students and their work. Collecting data on eight teams of four students each seems more time-efficient than assessing 32 students. Right?

The issue is that group work creates problems for knowing what each student understands and does not understand. A common complaint is that a few students do the work, while their teammates stand aside and get credit for the assessed skills. Also, parents don't want their child's grades to suffer because the group work by other students was below quality. In all of these cases, collecting group data lacks any validity for what each student knows and does not know as an individual.

For example, consider the classic group presentation at the end of a unit. If four students team up to give a ten-minute presentation, each will have about two minutes of talk-time to demonstrate a deep understanding of the unit's major concepts and skills. Given the limited time for each presentation part, demonstrating content understanding based on depths of knowledge would be shallow. In this example, the limited time is likely helpful to give feedback on demonstration of college and career readiness skills like communication and collaboration.

Eliminate assessment fog from group assessments. Consider the following guidelines for students to work in groups while checking for each individual's understanding.

Observe This Rule

Rule 1: All academic assessments are individual. Rule 2: Refer to rule 1. Follow this mantra. The result is clear data on how each student is progressing. Any data used for individual coaching or recording of grades are intentionally individual, so there can be little chance of foggy data that might misrepresent the learner's progress. Use a variety of tests, quizzes, journals, and interviews. A side benefit is that parents and students feel more confident about the work, because students have a sense of being in control of their own destiny. Prior to the group presentation, they could each write a position paper that addresses the key concepts, which is then assessed for feedback and academic recording. The team collects these papers to use for crafting the presentation. Another option is to give an exam after the group presentations. In this case, the presentations become a review experience prior to the test.

Use and Communicate Checkpoints

One value of teamwork is the mutual support that each person receives when tackling complex work and building a comprehension base. Spaced through a unit, checkpoints are formative assessment opportunities to track the growth of each student. The results are used to help those falling behind and to challenge those who need appropriate complex work. This ensures that no student falls behind for more than a day, and that no advanced learner stagnates due to lack of challenge. Break the major products into chunks based on what concepts should be understood at a given level and timeframe. Use assessments that anchor each section. Some quick assessments include:

Exit cards

Reflection journals

Checklist reflections

Non-graded quizzes

Make Work Collaborative, Not Group Tasks

Often there is "the" product that the team must craft. Even if everyone did their part, they would only know their part. In collaborative work, each student develops a draft or prototype of the product, which is turned in for individual assessment. The team's job is to take something from each person's work when forming the group's final product for a public audience. Another benefit is that as students work on their vision for the product, they can have collaborative conversations about the content and processes. Have students produce reflective learning journals about their understanding, which will document their unique perspective on the work, even when several students have similar ideas. Helpful tools include:

Graphic organizers

Thinking maps

Feedback and revision team conversations

Checklist-based team discussions

Group Work Has Value

Many schools strive to focus on preparing students for college and career opportunities after graduation. Working in teams is integral to student development of these important skills found from such sources as Tony Wagner's work on survival skills and the P21 organization. There is broad consensus for such skills as collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creativity, and self-management. Yet content curriculum remains the emperor of instruction. Both curriculum and the benefits of teamwork can occur -- provided that the academic assessments are individually based. Otherwise, the emperor is unclothed. Turn student groans into grunts of effort by truly knowing where each student is in his or her mastery of skills and concepts, while using authentic group experiences that ready students for their post-secondary future.

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Going Beyond Group Assessments for Learning

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John McCarthy Education Consultant, Advocate for Student Voice in Learning Whenever announcing group or team assessments, the typical response by students and parents is "Groan." Even parents who are teachers do the same. Individual assessments are missing in teamwork. Group assessments are useful for managing a large number of students and their work.

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Summative assessments are the end of unit, course, or any comprehensive recapitulation of a subject at its capstone.

Example: Teacher conducts an exhibition of student's learning for the quarter to determine if the student was able to create a deeper meaning of the "arc or guided" questioned asked.

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Rigorous expectations yield impressive results at New York's School of the Future, where regular assessments help keep students on track, and teachers strive to tap into students' true interests to bring out their best work.

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Strategic Goals: Formative + Summative = Rigor

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Rigorous expectations yield impressive results at New York's School of the Future, where regular assessments help keep students on track, and teachers strive to tap into students' true interests to bring out their best work.

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Performance-based assessments allows students to be measured on their "ability to apply the skills and knowledge learned from a unit or units of study... use their higher-order thinking skills to create a product or complete a process" (Hilliard, 2015).

Example: Teacher creates "an open-ended question that may produce several different correct answers" (Chun, 2010; McTighe, 2015).

Then the teacher will design the assessment from the following format:

1. Identify goals of the performance-based assessment
2. Select the appropriate course standards.
3. Review assessments and identify learning gaps.
4. Design the scenario.
(Hilliard, 2015)

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Diagnostic assessments determines the instructional need of a student's progression and deficit. It also can determine the type of intervention is most beneficial to address the student's need.

Example: Teacher gives a diagnostic assessment in the beginning of the year (BOY), such as iReady or MAPP. These test ask a series of questions to determine a student's reading level. The information is used create homogenous groupings, intervention plans, and other instructional implications to aid student deficits or enrichment.

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Page 5: Diagnostic Assessment

In the DBI process, teachers use a diagnostic assessment (Step 3) to determine specific instructional needs. When progress monitoring data indicate that a student is not sufficiently responding to the current intervention, teachers need to determine:

Why is the student not responding?

What type of change needs to be made to the intervention?

A diagnostic assessment can help teachers to answer these questions. A diagnostic assessment is a tool teachers can use to collect information about a student's strengths and weaknesses in a skill area. These assessments can be formal (e.g., standardized achievement test) or informal (e.g., work samples).

Listen as Rebecca Zumeta Edmonds discusses several options for conducting a diagnostic assessment (time: 2:09).

Rebecca Zumeta Edmonds, PhD
Principal Researcher
American Institutes for Research

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View Transcript
Transcript: Rebecca Zumeta, PhD

There's a variety of tools that schools can use. Depending on their context they may have reasons for choosing one or another. Obviously, when they're available, standardized diagnostic assessment tools give you the most reliable and valid information. Those may be different kinds of achievement tests that are available in the marketplace. The WIAT is a very common one; the Woodcock Johnson achievement test of some kind, those are a couple of examples. The other options may be doing some more in-depth error analysis of progress monitoring data. The progress monitoring data overall score is not particularly useful for knowing why a kid is or is not making progress. All that tells you is that they're not making progress. But with many of the measures you can go in and look at the kinds of errors children are making and come up with some hypotheses of about why they may or may not be progressing. For example, with oral reading fluency you can look at the kind of errors that a child is making and get a sense of are they semantic errors, are they errors relating to their understanding of phonics, is the reading very accurate that's slow and laborious. All of those kinds of patterns tell you different things about the potential area of need that the child may have. And then another type of diagnostic assessment that is much more informal but can help you again come up with a hypotheses about why the student may be struggling to progress would be end-of-unit tests, students' work samples, homework assignments, things of that nature that really do give some texture to what the child is doing and the skills where they seem to have relative strengths and weaknesses. We realize more and more that as kids get older they're presenting with academic challenges that's often co-occurring behaviors, and so we really strongly feel that in any kind of an evaluation for a student or a team getting together and trying to understand why a child may be having a lack of progress that you can't just look at academics or you just can't look at behavior in isolation. There really does need to be a broader picture of the child.

Before conducting a diagnostic assessment, it is important to rule out other factors that might be impeding student progress. To do this, the teacher should review a student's graphed progress monitoring data, looking for patterns that might indicate the reason for the student's performance. To help determine the reason for a student's performance, a teacher might find it helpful to consider the questions associated with the student's data pattern.

Data Pattern

The student answers the same number of questions correctly even after the intervention has been implemented. This data pattern suggests either:

The teacher did not implement the intervention with fidelity.
fidelity
In general, this term refers to the degree to which an intervention is implemented accurately, following the guidelines or restrictions of its developers. In this case, fidelity refers to the teacher implementing the adaptation(s) as the instructional decision-making team intended.

The intervention was not effective for the student.

Questions

Has the intervention been implemented as planned (i.e., with fidelity)?

In addition to considering whether the teacher implemented the intervention with fidelity, also consider whether there are other factors that might have affected fidelity (e.g., student absences, field trip, assembly).

Data Pattern

The student answers questions correctly on some days but not others. He appears to have the knowledge or skills being assessed. This data pattern suggests either:

The student was not engaged or motivated.

Progress monitoring measures were not administered or scored consistently.

Questions

Is the student engaged in or motivated by the intervention?

Are there are extenuating circumstances (e.g., family issues, lack of sleep, hunger, not feeling well) that would affect motivation and engagement?

Is progress monitoring conducted at the same time and day across weeks?

Did the person administering the measure receive adequate training?

Is more than one person administering the measure? If so, are they following the same guidelines?

Data Pattern

The student answers very few, if any, questions correctly. This data pattern suggests either:

The assessment might be too difficult for the student.

The intervention was not effective for the student.

The progress monitoring probe does not assess the skills being taught.

Question
Is the progress monitoring measure targeting the appropriate academic skills?

If school personnel determine that there are factors (e.g., lack of implementation fidelity, lack of student engagement) that may be hindering student progress, these factors need to be addressed. However, if school personnel are able to rule the factors out, the next step is to conduct a diagnostic assessment, which might include an error analysis.

Error Analysis

Teachers can conduct an error analysis-the process of reviewing error patterns to identify a student's skill deficits-with progress monitoring data and work samples. An error analysis can help a teacher determine what types of errors were made and why. By identifying error patterns, the teacher can identify a student's skill deficits and can subsequently align intervention adaptations to the student's specific needs.

There are a variety of ways to conduct error analyses, and these differ depending on the skills targeted in the intervention and the grade level of the student. Two common areas for which teachers might conduct error analyses are reading and mathematics. Each of these will be discussed on the following pages.

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In the DBI process, teachers use a diagnostic assessment (Step 3) to determine specific instructional needs. When progress monitoring data indicate that a student is not sufficiently responding to the current intervention, teachers need to determine: Why is the student not responding? What type of change needs to be made to the intervention?

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A formative assessment is a way the teacher can gather information (i.e., data) on the student's understanding of lesson. It is a valuable tool to drive data based instruction by allowing the teacher to make pivots in their instruction  to increase overall student achievement and misconceptions through the process.

Example: Teacher uses aggressive monitoring to take "quick scales." This method creates an urgency for learning in the classroom by allowing the student to write down their answers to questions in a controlled narrative.  As the teacher circulates throughout the classroom they will know which students need a re-teach or the whole class.

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Assessing student knowledge and understanding is not a new phenomenon, but doing so can take on a variety of different forms. We are all familiar with homework, examinations, and quizzes as part and parcel of academic life, no matter if you happen to be a child in the early school years or a university student progressing through their undergraduate program.

What does Formative Assessment mean?

Many of us may be familiar with FA but not quite able to define what it is and what it is when put into practice. In essence formative assessment is a way to monitor student learning while it is happening and thus adjust teaching methods and lesson plans accordingly. FA is a continuous process that helps to uncover student learning with the goal of helping to improve their understanding of specific topics and subjects. Many define formative assessment as an 'assessment for learning'.

Formative vs Summative Assessment

Summative is what comes to mind when many of us think of assessments and evaluations. Examinations, finals, quizzes, and graded papers are examples of summative assessments that test student knowledge of a given topic or subject. These graded assessments and assignments are often high stakes and are geared towards testing students.

The key differences between these two methods of assessment are that summative assessment assesses what students know, what information they have retained, and how they are performing. FA helps educators understand if lessons, lectures, classes, and assignments are providing students with the necessary framework to comprehend and retain information.

FA is a continuous process that can be run on a day-to-day or even a lesson-by-lesson basis while summative assessments tend to take place at the end of chapters, semesters, or years. Both work to inform educators how students are progressing and work in tandem to paint a picture of classroom performance.

Examples of formative assessment

So with those definitions covered, it is time we look at some relevant activities and examples that educators of any institution or age can implement in their classrooms, lecture theaters, or seminar rooms. The beauty of these examples is that they can be run at a variety of points throughout a class or lecture. Some work best when included right at the beginning, while others can be used at a midway point.

As with all formative assessments these are not designed to be graded in any way and are constructed to be simple and offer a basic reading of students' comprehension.

1. Live multiple-choice poll

No matter if you are discussing World War II or the different past tenses in French, a live multiple choice that asks students about your current lesson is the most basic and useful form of FA. These quick hitter questions can be more informative than simply asking students, "Is that clear for everyone?". Using a tool that can both run this poll and visualize results means it can fit seamlessly into the lesson without taking an inordinate amount of time.

2. Pre-class open-ended question

Asking students to recall what they learned last week or even yesterday can help gauge what important information has been retained and what may have been overlooked. This type of question will require students to recall and reflect on what they have learned and to construct an answer in their own words.

Neither questions nor responses need to be overly complex or detailed, they can be something as simple as "What was the most interesting thing we discussed yesterday?". This will allow you to see what students found compelling and what topics come up the most and least frequently.

3. End-of-class feedback forms or questionnaires

Ok so you've gone through your hour-long lecture or seminar, but how can you be sure that your students retained anything, and that their eyes didn't glaze over twenty minutes in? A survey can help clear things up for you and can help you accurately evaluate how things went. Like with a live poll or open-ended question, a survey does not necessarily need to be 10 or fifteen questions long, it can be short, sweet, and to the point.

Here you can ask students if they found the lecture or class informative, whether it was engaging enough to make concentrating easy, or if it was an enjoyable way of learning.

4. Quick scales

Asking students to write down answers can potentially be time-consuming as they formulate ideas and consider how best to word their responses. Likewise, it can take some time for you to go through each answer and draw solid conclusions, identify patterns, and gather insights. Providing students with set responses in the form of scales questions can eliminate much of this additional time as they can respond almost immediately. Additionally, you can see swiftly and clearly from a graph of answers how the average responses look at whether there are notable outliers.

5. Short answer Word Cloud

If you are looking for some clear and concise responses then simply ask students to submit a one-word or short response to your question. This will require them to carefully consider before submitting their answers and this can help you quickly parse through answers in comparison to those containing full or multiple sentences. Word Clouds can be an easy way to gather these answers as they can provide a dynamic visual.

6. Emoji Survey

Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to spend time in the hospital is probably familiar with the Wong-Baker pain scale. Travelers may have also seen something similar in airports and train stations when asked about security services or how happy they were with the available services. So why not introduce something similar to your classroom or lecture theater? These are simple and effective scales that can be customized to ask any question you like while respondents are presented with uncomplicated answers that take little to no time to submit.

Additional benefits of formative assessment

By providing students with a platform to voice and express their thoughts and opinions on how things are going for them within the classroom you can quickly develop a culture of sharing that is free from anxiety or fear. Asking students to regularly contribute in this way may help them overcome fears of speaking out and voicing their own opinions, which can often be difficult for introverted or young students who lack the confidence to express an inability to understand something.

As well as this, FA can underline just how important participating in classroom activities and discussions is and how they are ultimately beneficial for every student. Thus, they can help improve student buy-in and avoid some frustrations that often come with difficulties to understand or retain information. Allowing students the chance to express this inability to comprehend you can help to clear roadblocks that ultimately lead to frustration and discouragement.

What to do with formative assessments?

So now that you have a series of examples that you can use, you may be wondering what you can do with the feedback and submission provided by your students. Well, hopefully, you have managed to gain a series of useful insights that you can use to improve lesson plans going forward, highlight ways your teaching method can be adapted for your student's benefit, or underline things that may not have caused confusion in the past.

A wonderful part of FA is that you can continuously monitor the situation and look at trends over time to not get just a clearer picture of the situation, but how students' responses have changed over time in reaction to changes you have implemented. You can see if some of the tweaks you have made have benefited everyone or the majority, whether your adjustments have been beneficial or they have created a new series of difficulties.

No matter if you want to run live polls and open-ended questions, or if you prefer the idea of using questionnaires and surveys, Mentimeter has a wide variety of interactive slides that make it straightforward for students to respond immediately and anonymously. Likewise, you can download results from each presentation and analyze trends over time to uncover actionable insights that will benefit both you and your students.

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Formative assessment is oftentimes the ideal way for educators of all age groups to get an accurate gauge of how students are retaining information, whether they are understanding what is going on, and whether or not their lessons are understandable and comprehensible.

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Professional Practice of Formative Assessment

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Professional Practice of Formative Assessment

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-Final Exams: GCSEs, A-Levels or end of year exams
-SATs
-AP Exams
-Piano Exams
-IELTS
-Dissertation/Thesis Submission
-PISA Tests
-The MCATS
-The Bar

https://helpfulprofessor.com/summative-assessment-examples/

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Cambridge Assessment International Education (CIE - GCSE and A-Level)

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Cambridge Assessment International Education (CIE - GCSE and A-Level)

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335333430_Application_of_diagnostic_assessment_on_beginning_school_year

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This link is helpful for anyone who wishes to learn more about Diagnostic Assessments in the classroom.

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Diagnostic assessments are essentially pretests. They are conducted in the beginning of a unit or course where it is used to collect data on what the students already know. Many teachers may also use diagnostic assessments to find out if any students have any pre existing misconceptions about the subject matter.

It can be through MCQ questions, quizzes, getting students to create a mind map, or even simple google forms.

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Performance Assessment is essentially a task given to students to measure how well they are able to understand and apply all the knowledge and skills that they've learnt.

This can take be in project based learning where students need to create something or work together on something meaningful and engaging. Performance assessments essentially focus a lot more on the process and usually take up a lot more time.

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This video gives a good breakdown of what performance assessment is.

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Examples of Assessment Of, For and As Learning.

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Examples of Assessment Of, For and As Learning.

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Some forms of Assessment for Learning can be through asking simple questions during the learning process, similar to formative assessment just so the teacher is able to know what the students have learnt.

Assessment As Learning can be through self-assessments or exit tickets so students are able to know where they are in the learning process and this helps them identify what they need to work towards.

Assessment Of Learning can take place similarly to summative assessments where exams, quizzes or tests are used to evaluate student knowledge against a set rubric.

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This image and website is extremely helpful to explain these 3 types of assessments.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/32320377/Assessment-for-learning-Confused-%28article%29

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Types of Assessments used in the Classroom

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Types of Assessments used in the Classroom