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Exploring the Importance of Using Formative Assessment in Informing Instruction to Improve Student Learning
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Wilson, Sarah |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | This literature review explores the importance of incorporating formative assessments and use of data to drive instructional decisions and address problems in the learning process for students. The review begins by exploring the definition of formative assessment, and how it can be used in the classroom. It provides examples of formative assessments that can be used in the classroom setting and what those formative assessment could tell a teacher about the next steps in the learning process. Next, this literature review discusses the importance of evaluating and using data gathered from formative assessments in order to make informed instructional decisions to increase student learning and performance. Using formative assessment and assessment data to drive instruction provides a multitude of benefits that can be an extremely cost effective for schools to improve students learning and performance. Assessment is an everincreasing part of education, and developing teacher skills in this area has the potential to reap a multitude of benefits for students and educators. Not only does assessment help a teacher to make evidence based instructional decisions, it also has the potential to identify students who are struggling and provide early interventions to address issues before they become major learning issues. IMPORTANCE OF FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT TO IMPROVE STUDENT LEARNING 3 Exploring the Importance of Formative Assessment in Informing Instruction to Improve Student Learning Assessment and the use of data has become an ever-increasing part of today's teacher vocabulary and classroom practices. Assessment is a topic with a wide variety of definitions within the field of education, and evaluating the effectiveness of the many types of assessment is often a difficult task. There are many different forms of assessment, each with their own specific purpose, and determining what kind of assessment is most effective is highly dependent on the purpose of the data a teacher is trying to collect. There are wide ranges of opinions that exist about high stakes assessment such as Iowa Assessments, ACT, SAT, and other standardized measures of achievement, but each of these forms of testing is often used to make important decisions in the life of a student and the status of a school as a whole. Since these assessments are so often used in making major decisions, there is a great deal of discussion regarding strategies that could be used to improve student performance in order to positively impact these high stakes scores. Along with that, the field of education is constantly changing a growing, and working to improve student learning is a constant goal. Trends in formative assessment and using data to positively impact student learning have become an integral part of teacher practices in the classroom today. Using data has been a rising trend in education, especially since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. After this law was enacted, high stakes assessment data was widely used to monitor the effectiveness of schools and as a tool to attempt to improve struggling schools by identifying areas of weakness and formulating interventions in an attempt to overcome these weaknesses (No Child Left Behind, 2001). In 2015, the Every Student S쳮ds Act was signed into law by former President, Barak Obama in an effort to continue and IMPORTANCE OF FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT TO IMPROVE STUDENT LEARNING 4 improve on the goals set forth by No Child Left Behind. This law also focused on continuing the efforts of improving schools, and it included measures to improve the use of assessment and data for making decisions about students and schools (Every Student S쳮ds Act, 2015). As the use of data has evolved, it has become evident that using it to make decisions can be very useful to increasing student achievement. Even though teachers recognize the importance of using data, there is often a great deal of frustration around the topic of depending solely on data from high stakes testing as the only indicator of student and school success. There are a myriad of limitations that arise when looking at or using high stakes assessment scores, and this can be a major source of discontent and distrust of that system because far too much significance is placed on these onetime scores (Erkens, Ferriter, Goodwin, Heflebower, Hierck, Jakicic, Kramer, Overlie, Rose, Vagle, Young, 2009). The question that educators are then faced with is, what kind of data is most helpful, and what can teachers do to get and use data that will aid in making informed decisions to increase student learning and close the achievement gap? While high stakes testing data can be useful, one of its most significant limitations is how distant it often is from current student achievement as it is often reported weeks or months after the test is administered, and it is often far too vague which does not allow the teacher to target specific aspects of the learning process in order to further student understanding. Formative assessment conducted in a classroom gives teachers real-time results of student understanding which allows teachers to make immediate decisions regarding the next steps in the learning process (Curry, Mwavita, Holter, & Harris, 2016). What is formative assessment and why is it important? “Formative assessment is a systematic process to continuously gather evidence about learning” (Heritage, 2007, p. 2). Formative assessment is an assessment method that teachers IMPORTANCE OF FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT TO IMPROVE STUDENT LEARNING 5 use to gather real-time information regarding the student's current level of understanding or their zone of proximal development. By meeting students at their zone of proximal development, teachers can better meet student needs by identifying specific issues in the learning process and then helping students to fill in gaps or misconceptions in understanding before continuing to build on material. This process allows students who are struggling with earlier steps in learning to receive appropriate interventions before they are too far behind to catch up with their peers. If students feel that they are being inappropriately challenged, they will often give up and feel as if there is no purpose in trying to understand the material that they are struggling with. In contrast, if students are not challenged enough, they will become bored and it is unlikely that teachers will be able to further student thinking to foster student growth (Heritage, 2007). Formative assessment differs from summative assessment in that summative assessment aims to assess knowledge for all of the learning process at the end of learning in order to check for total understanding of standards. While summative assessment has its place in education, teachers place far too much value in the summative results that could be significantly improved through the use of formative assessments (Erkens et al., 2009). According to a study completed by Furtak et al., (2016), formative assessment can be broken down into four major parts: “designing formative assessment tasks, asking questions to elicit student thinking, interpreting student ideas, and providing feedback that moves student thinking forward” (p. 267). In this study, nine teachers participated in a three-year training program to develop and improve formative assessment skills. This program, Formative Assessment Design Cycle (FADC), provided a platform for uniform training in order to more accurately determine the effectiveness of teacher training in the implementation of formative assessment practices. The teachers were evaluated on a number of factors/skills including: IMPORTANCE OF FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT TO IMPROVE STUDENT LEARNING 6 ability of teacher to interpret student ideas, test scores, recorded classes to be evaluated for formative assessment practices, and quality of the tasks that were designed by each member of the training program. In the process of designing formative assessment, the purpose of these tasks is to gauge the student's current level of understanding. This could be derived from essential questions or concepts, learning objectives or targets, and skills goals for the unit or topic of learning. These tasks should give the teacher data about the student's current level of understanding. Most importantly, these tasks should give students an opportunity to demonstrate and share their ideas in order to receive feedback that can further develop their thinking. This opportunity to share ideas, allows students to have a chance to articulate themselves in a way that can help them develop a deeper understanding and consider other ideas (Furtak et al., 2016). In using formative assessment tasks, asking questions that will foster an increase in student's idea development is the next imperative step of the formative assessment process. Society and technology are constantly changing which means that the expectations for students entering the work force are changing as well. In this information rich time, rote memorization is no longer valued or a primary goal of learning. As the world grows and changes at an extremely rapid pace, today's learners need to be able to think about what they are learning in order to apply it to new situations so that they can be functional and productive members of modern society. This means that the development of critical thinking skills is crucial to the modern student's education (Ripley, 2013) Formative assessment gives the student opportunities to explore their own learning and develop their own ideas free of the fear and anxiety that may exist in higher stakes summative assessments. Collecting and Using Data IMPORTANCE OF FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT TO IMPROVE STUDENT LEARNING 7 The concept of collecting and using data is essential to being able to successfully use formative assessment in the classroom. However, data collection is not as intuitive as is often assumed by |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://nwcommons.nwciowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=education_masters |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
