Teachers who use formative assessments target their instruction to student needs. Teachers who do not use formative assessments rely on guesswork or generic plans, rather than basing their instructional decisions on data.
In the article "Formative Assessments in High School,"
Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey outline their four step approach to formative assessment: feed-up, checking for understanding, feedback, and feed-forward. During feed-up "a clear purpose should be communicated with students on a daily basis." The purpose of this is to zero in on the lesson target, so students and teacher know exactly what the focus is. Checking for Understanding is the second element, and the name of their other book that I just finished reading. Oral language; questions; writing; projects and performances; and quizzes and tests are mentioned as "excellent ways that teachers can check for student understanding." The third component is feedback. What struck me immediately about Fisher and Frey's discussion of feedback is that, though it is important, "feedback by itself has limited impact on student understanding and thus achievement." Though I can agree that some feedback is like this, from my other reading so far, the right kind of feedback does seems to result in dramatic impact on student understanding and achievement. Fisher and Frey released a new book called
The Formative Assessment Action Plan, which fleshes out their ideas in this article, so perhaps it will provide more on this topic. The last element of the formative assessment system, and its arguably most important part, is feed-forward, which "ensures that data is collected and analyzed for patterns so that the teacher can make informed decisions about what should be taught next. To accomplish this task, they suggest an error analysis sheet. "The error analysis sheet is a concrete example of the ways in which formative assessment system can be used to plan instruction" because once the data is gathered and analyzed, the teacher can plan whole class, small group, and one-on-on remediation for specific, targeted skills and content, thus providing the quality instruction and intervention needed.
Photo of labyrinth from vgm8383, who explains "the term labyrinth is often used interchangeably with maze, but modern scholars of the subject use a stricter definition. For them, a maze is a tour puzzle in the form of a complex branching passage with choices of path and direction; while a single-path ("unicursal") labyrinth has only a single Eulerian path to the center. A labyrinth has an unambiguous through-route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate."
