Annotating as an Assessment

I use annotating with my students all the time.  I find it so useful when trying to get students to revisit the text and look more deeply at the content and structure.  However, I never framed it as a formative assessment tool.  After reading this section of Cris Tovani's So What Do They Really Know?, I plan to use it this way in the future. To read Tovani's explanation of annotation, click here.   

When determining which of the myriad of assessment tools to use, Tovani simplifies matters by ensuring that all of her assessments meet four basic criteria:

• Can all learners use this tool to show thinking?
• Will this tool immediately inform my instruction and provide a way to give real-time feedback to students?
• Will patterns of understanding or confusion emerge as a result of using this tool?
• Is this tool convenient to design, use and administer?

If used deliberately, annotation can do all four.  Tovani concedes that

Annotating as a viable assessment opportunity is easy to dismiss because it is so simple to use.  Yet I continue to use this instructional strategy as my number-one source of trustworthy data, mainly because it puts learners in the driver's seat when it come to showing me what they understand. 

Without having "one right answer" annotation allows for divergent thinking on the part of students and allows the teacher to see the confusion, inferences, and strategies employed by students.  By looking at these "tracks of thinking" (as they are sometimes called), teachers can plan whole class or small group mini-lessons to target specific student needs.  

One extremely helpful strategy I got out of this chapter is using annotation as a pretest. Tovani talks about a math class annotating the end of chapter test on the first day of the unit to see what students already know about the content and what holes they have.  This in turn informs instruction since the teacher will know what content can be skipped or reviewed rather quickly and how students' past knowledge shapes their understanding of this new content.  Even if students have no clue how to do a specific problem, they still have to start it and write an annotation when they get stuck.  I can definitely see applying this to grammar, especially since students tend to come with ten years (or more) of background knowledge on the subject.  Though I give pretests, I have not had them annotate their pretests before.