Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children
At a time when much attention is focused on assessments of children’s learning, a report prepared for the Council of Chief State School Officers looks at formative assessments, which, as the executive director of the council writes in his forward, “is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning.” In this it differs from “summative assessments,” such as MCAS, which measure what students have learned.
“Early educators may find the report interesting because, although summative assessments like statewide tests are not given in the early grades, formative assessment is increasingly becoming important for educators working with children of all ages,” the Early Ed Watch blog notes. “The report describes in-depth what formative assessment should look like in practice and explains how the information obtained can help them to differentiate their instruction to meet students’ individual needs.”
The study – “Formative Assessment and Next-Generation Assessment Systems: Are We Losing an Opportunity?” — was written by Margaret Heritage of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing. Heritage cites the 1998 study “Inside the Black Box,” by Paul Black and Dylan William, Heritage that found that “the student learning gains triggered by formative assessment were amongst the largest ever reported for educational interventions,” especially for low achieving students. “This was, and remains, a powerful argument for formative assessment,” Heritage writes, although, Early Ed Watch notes, some experts say this research has been “oversold.”
Heritage expresses concern at “the surprisingly narrow treatment” formative assessment seems to be getting from the two groups of states working to develop assessments aligned with the Common Core Standards — the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC). Heritage worries about a “slide toward a new form of exogenous measures.”
Commissioner Mitchell Chester of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education chairs PARCC’s governing board; its charge includes developing K-2 assessments. In Massachusetts, the third grade MCAS test is currently the first statewide measure of children’s progress.
“The unprecedented amounts of money that will be spent on the development of next-generation systems,” Heritage writes, “should surely provide the nation with an opportunity to fully establish formative assessment, not just as a more frequent, finer-grained test (or tool as it is sometimes referred to), but as a practice involving both teachers and students.”
Heritage presented her findings at a panel discussion that was the subject of an Ed Week story.
Eye on Early Education focuses on the twin goals of ensuring that Massachusetts children have access to high-quality early education and become proficient readers by the end of third grade.
As we try to build a system in which all teachers share the knowledge that exists in some part of the system, and as we try to develop common core standards from birth to and through colllege, this seems to me important for all teachers to know.
]It’s true that formative evaluation is known to early childhood educators. That requres teachers to have the skills of observation that enable them to build their teaching on what the children they teach already know and are interested in knowing more about. How sad that teachers in later grades are not expected to have this knowledge.
excellent post. It is through thinking and evaluating and observing and assessing kids on a continual basis that we learn where they are and where they are going. We find the stuck places as well as the places that are moving smoothly.
I can see the 2 year old who never focuses except when she has a huge pile of books. This reminds me that she is an amazing story teller. It makes me look more closely at what I see as lack of focus. Oh, yes it seems that it is her attempts to manage the play of her friends, trying to get them to fit into her sophisticated story lines. I remember that when she is dressing she always pauses at the story that I tell about how a zipper works. She is too young to master a zipper, but she remembers the story and wants me to repeat it to her each day, embellishing it as I go along. So I begin to think, how can I use stories to help this child to focus through routines, so that she enters kindergarten with this attentive focus in her back pocket? I repeat to her the story of the next 2 or 3 things she is to do…”Put away your boots and then put away your hat and then take off your wet tights.” I slow down then and repeat the first part of the ‘story’ of what is about to happen. And she does it.
And in this way, I ‘form’ the curriculum to her needs, and I ‘form’ her to the needs of society, the focus that we all need in order to move forward. It happens in drips and drabs, and she still has plenty of time to read big piles of books, learn how to balance her needs with those of her playmates and still have time for independent play and projects. She doesn’t perceive herself as someone who doesn’t fit the group. I don’t either, instead I see her as someone who will take a bit longer to learn focus. A win for both of us.
This is a great way of talking about what it is that a good teacher, or parent is doing all day every day as they meet and begin to form the children in their care.
I loved this post, and this new bit of jargon that so aptly describes what I do all day long.
Formative assessments are so important! Thanks for this post, Irene.
Mindy