Creativity Cafe: Recipes for Formative Assessment
Tuesday, June 26, 2018 ⬥ 1:15 – 3:15 PM
Presented by Kevin Bower
Session Description:
Visit the Creativity Cafe for recipes to guide instruction with free formative assessment tools to tailor your students’ talents. We’ll outline the different phases of blended learning and share the secret ingredients for formative evaluation for each phase of the process.
Purpose & Objective:
Assessment is often associated with quizzes, exams, and summative assessments. However, summative assessments are limited in that they provide little information to guide teaching because they usually serve as the endpoint of some instruction. Summative assessments are assessments “of” learning, formative assessments are assessments “for” learning. The purpose of this session is to outline the different phases of blended learning and share the secret ingredients for formative evaluation for each phase or the process. This significant shift in the purpose of assessment is critical to the success of any student-centered environment, especially a blended class.
Assessing prior knowledge is not the only assessment opportunity in the pre-teaching phase of blended instruction. Teachers can also assess students after they have interacted with assigned video lessons to pre-teach the concepts. The phase is important to discover the starting point for the learners and informs the instructor on how to organize lessons and what techniques to use with the students. Participants will engage with free formative tools to provide quantitative and qualitative data.
During class, it is important for the teacher to incorporate activities and lessons to help students build on the concepts they learned during the pre-teaching phase. For example, formative assessment tools provide the teacher the opportunity to assess whether or not the students are effectively applying the concepts. Formative assessments during this phase of the blended learning process are important because it provides students the opportunity to select resources to demonstrate learning objectives. Formative assessment feedback also provides both the teacher and student information if a concept needs to be retaught or enrich opportunities provided.
In the final phase of blended learning, after class, the students are extending their learning by applying the concepts to new situations or building on the concepts through additional instruction. These situations lend themselves to even more formative assessments. For instance, as students exit the class, instructors can ask them to submit what they felt was the most challenging aspect of the lesson or something the student may still be unclear. Formative assessments in the after class phase of blended learning provide useful information as instructors create or select content to assign.
Session Slide Deck:
