Four Part Assessment Plan

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."

Oral Language Strategies

Chapter 2 of Checking for Understanding: Formative Assessment Techniques for Your Classroom is about using Oral Language to check for understanding.  Throughout the chapter, Fisher and Frey offer several strategies that I find helpful. 
1. Accountable talk- students have partner or small group discussions that  are monitored my the instructor.  Based on the contest covered in the discussions, the instructor will have a good ideas of patterns of confusion or gaps that still exist in the instruction.
2. Noticing nonverbal cues- the instructor remains watchful to pick up on frustration, confusion, or that "aha moment"
3. Value lineups- "a structure for fostering peer discourse based on students' opinions about an academic topic."  Though this can be difficult to do with a large class, it is doable- I have done this many times.  However, I have found that it may be easier to do if you move the class outside.  The description in the book says that students are to line up according to how strongly they agree or disagree with a given statement.  the line is then folded in half "so that the students who most strongly agreed and disagreed wit one another are now face to face."   I do not do it this way, though.  I split the line in half and match the lines so the student who disagrees the strongest is matched up with a student in the middle.  The same goes for the student who agrees the strongest.  If you match them up as Fisher and Frey suggest, you will end up with students who are closest to the middle and will agree with each other.  This makes for a boring discussion. 
4.  Retellings- "new accounts or adaptations of a text that allow students to consider information and then summarize, orally, what they understand about this information." 
5.  Think-Pair-Share- students are given time to think, they share this thinking with their partners, and then the partners share out to the class.  I use this strategy quite a bit. 

The important thing about formative assessment is that it ceases to be formative if it does not inform instruction.  If an instructor is not careful, it is possible to conduct any of the activities above and neglect feedback and reflection.   

How Not to Check for Understanding

"Does anyone have any questions? No one. So we all understand?" 
I am guilty of doing this in my classroom, and as Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey admit in the opening of Checking for Understanding: Formative Assessment Techniques for Your Classroom, they are too.   However, they go on to explain why we can not do it again.

Rather than respond to these questions, most will sit quietly, and the lecturer doesn't know whether they understand, they are too confused to answer, they think they get it (but are off base), or they are too embarrassed to show their lack of understanding in front of others (1).

 Questioning can be a very effective instructional strategy; it can even be a powerful form of formative assessment.  But the vague and general questions above will not help a teacher to gather the specific data to inform instruction or to offer specific feedback to the learner.  I will freely admit that I ask these rather useless questions sometimes when I think that the students already know a piece of information I am reviewing, or I am in a hurry, or when I am already thinking ahead to the next task or assignment.  But, it will not do. 

Additionally, students aren't always self-regulated learners.  They may not be aware of what they do or do not understand.   They sometimes think they get it, when they really don't.

 I experienced this phenomenon myself this week.  I was taking a dance class and the instructor showed us a sequence of movements and explained what she was doing. She then asked if there were any questions.  I was not quite sure what she was doing, but I decided that I at least understood well enough to muddle through it. However, when she had us perform the movement, I realized I had no idea what I was doing.  I fit clearly in the doesn't know whether they understand category.  I thought that I knew, but I was way off base.  Had the instructor not checked for understanding by making us show her, I would have had no idea that I was confused, and the instructor would not have known that she needed to take the time to break down the sequence into greater detail.  Checking for understanding made me aware as a learner and informed the instruction that followed.

Quotes: the importance of feedback

“Champions know that success is inevitable; that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. They know that the best way to forecast the future is to create it.”- Michael Gelb, internationally renowned author, speaker, and consultant

 

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”-Ken Blanchard, leadership expert

 

 

Feedback: the root of it all

 We begin by discussing feedback, the practice in which both assessment and grading have their roots.

While organizing some of my books, I rediscovered Formative Assessment & Standards-Based Grading by Robert J. Marzano, which is the second of his Classroom Strategies that Work series.  (The first Marzano book I read was Classroom Instruction that Works, and I have been blessed to have read several more over the years.)   Though most of this book deals with assessment and grading, the opening deals specifically with feedback.  

Feedback can be given formally or informally in group or one-on-one settings.  It can take a variety of forms. [...] Its most important and dominant characteristic is that it informs the student, the teacher, and all other interested parties about how to best enhance student learning.

The emphasis clearly is on student learning, which, if you read the rest of the book, is the emphasis of grading as well.  Through Marzano's analysis, he found that while feedback provided a positive growth, most of the time, it did not produce positive growth all of the time. 

This, of course, raises the critically important questions, What are the characteristics of feedback that produce positive effects on student achievement, and what are the characteristics that produce negative effects? 

An apt pair of questions indeed.  The conclusion: "negative feedback is that which does not let students know how they can get better" (5).  This conclusion seems to mirror much of the other research that I have found that outlines the need for feedback to be specific and helpful.  Referencing a study by Hattie and Timperley, Marzano continues to explain that

feedback to students regarding how well a task is going (task), the process they are using to complete the task (process), or how well they are managing their own behavior (self-regulation) is often effective, but feedback that simply involves statements like "You're doing a good job" has little influence on student achievement. 

My conclusion:  I need to deliberately work on providing more meaningful feedback.
Credit: Free photos from acobox.com

Feedback: Putting More Air in the Balloon

I received Better Evidence-Based Education, published by John's Hopkins School of Education, in the mail and was thrilled to see that this issue is entitled: Assessment, and it is packed with resources on the topic of my summer investigation.  While skimming through the titles, the first one to catch my eye is "Formative Assessment and Feedback to Learners" by Steve Higgins, a professor of Education at Durham University.

Higgins begins the article by stating its purpose:

One of the questions that teachers have frequently asked me for the review is was about what works in terms of formative assessment and feedback to students.

I love when an author's purpose for writing is so closely aligned with my purpose for reading.

Though it is a bit of an aside, one analogy that caught my attention was comparing test prep to squeezing a balloon.

We know too that simply practicing assessments will improve students' performance, at least in the short term, but this does not help them with their learning. It's rather like squeezing a child's balloon, the bulge you make when you squeeze it makes the balloon look like it is getting bigger, but there is really no more air in there.  Once you let go, it goes back to the size it was before.  Test practice is a bit like this in that the students aren't learning anything new.  You are just squeezing the balloon.  The way you get more air in the balloon is through more effective instruction.  A key component of this is feedback which keeps teaching and learning on track to achieve its goals.(emphasis is mine)

Why feedback? It is central to ensuring that students have what they need to grow.  Upon continuing this article, I realized that it is narrower in scope than I had originally thought, which is a positive in a two page article.  Higgins suggests that teachers give feedback on the task, the process, and self-regulation.  Providing feedback on the task is fairly common sense; however, feedback on process is something that I need to improve.  It just seems to take so long to do.

One finding from the review is that

letting students know when they get things right, and why they are correct is even more important than pointing out mistakes or errors.

The reasoning behind this seems to be that students need to know what they did well to try to better understand the moves for success so they are likely to do it again.  By pointing out what students do correctly, they are also better prepared to draw conclusions or create patterns and heuristics to know why something is correct.  Internalizing why a thing is or is not correct is where the real learning takes place.

photo courtesy of http://medphoto.wellcome.ac.uk/

Feedback that Fortifies

"Fortifies" connotes strength and building up. In addition to castles and parapets, thanks to breakfast cereal and other marvels of modern agriculture, I also think about vitamins and "enriched" carbohydrates.  It is such a good word. In the context of the chapter, Cris Tovani (in So What Do They Really Know?) focuses on feedback that helps students to learn, not just feedback that clarifies why they received the grade they did. 

 Feedback needs to be targeted throughout the teaching and learning cycle because it directs kids back to learning.  Without time to apply the feedback, lengthy comments and conferences are a waste of time.  If I wait and give feedback only when an assignment is due the feedback is too late to be useful" (112).

 Not only is it too late to be useful, it is often just discarded into the trash can, sometimes with only a cursory glance.

Another issue addressed in this chapter is endurance and persisting when confronted with difficult text and assignments.  Tovani asserts that "When students feel unsuccessful, they quit trying because they don't know what else to do."  This makes modeling so important, not just for students, but for everyone.  I do not like cookbooks without pictures because I want to know what it is supposed to look like before I even start cooking.  Crystal clear directions are just not enough.  I need to see the finished product or I do not even want to start.  The only time this is not true is when I am cooking with someone who knows what they are doing. For example, my mom makes a recipe that has been in my family for quite some time.  Though it uses fairly simple ingredients, the process is challenging. In this case, all the pictures of the finished recipe will not help me to feel confident.  This is why I have not made them since I moved out of my parents' house 11 years ago. This summer, while my mom was visiting for two weeks, I had her make the recipe with me.  Then she could get me started and answer questions when I got confused about exactly how warm the warm water was supposed to be.  Even more importantly, she was there to let me know if I was doing something wrong.  The entire process takes at least four hours to complete, so I did not, under any circumstances, want to find out that I had messed up only after pulling the recipe out of the oven. 

I do not always like to give my students an example of a finished product because I fear that it will impinge on creative thinking and result in carbon copies of the example.  However, modeling the process through a think-aloud or shared writing experience is so important to help students to feel more confident and self-assured.  It makes the task seem not so far out of reach.  As Tovani reminds us, "Once learners quit, teachers are in trouble."