Formative Assessment - Part 3 - Secondary Effects

All educational practices, both effective ones and ineffective, have side effects.  

Some side effects are undesirable: 

• lost instructional time from over-adherence to inquiry
• lack of development of organizational skills because Google Drive is searchable and doesn't require organization
• lost focus from attempted "multi-tasking"
• anxiety from large amounts of high-stakes testing

Some side effects (even from the same practice) are great:

• increased relationship development during an inquiry experience
• students with ADHD not losing all of their work because Google Drive is searchable and doesn't require organization
• recognition of how important focus is after an attempt at "multi-tasking"
• recognition that you are stronger than you think you are when you persevere through a time of high-stakes testing.

I have noticed some side effects of implementing intentional formative assessment in my classroom.  I have yet to find an undesirable effect, but there are three strong upsides that I have particularly noticed.

1.  Keeping them on their toes

It is possible for apathetic students to go entire days without paying attention to the teacher.  If teachers are merely calling on those with their hands up, the uninterested student can simply not raise his hand. If she knows she has tutoring later, the uninterested student might check out and do some online shopping, knowing she can learn it later. 

Without checking for understanding, a student can get all the way to test day without a teacher ever knowing he is lost. 

I like it when educational principles show up in my life outside of school, and this is one of those times.  I mentioned a few weeks ago on this blog that I have been attending a liturgical church for about a year.  Liturgy often involves a fair amount of call-and-response style participation from the congregation.  A couple of weeks into my attendance at this church, I said to a friend, "There is no way to let your mind wander there." She asked what I meant, and I showed her the bulletin.  "Everything in bold print is something I'm supposed to say.  So, I can't let my mind wander because I've got a line coming soon."

Ongoing formative assessment that requires participation from all students is just like that.  They have a line coming soon.  It keeps them engaged because they know they will be asked a question about what they are doing now about three minutes from now. No one wants to hold up their mini-whiteboard to show a ridiculous answer, so after a few questions, when they realize you really are going to keep doing this, they usually pay better attention.

2. It is motivating to know what your progress is

Have you ever suffered from the illusion of competence?  You know what I mean, you studied for a test, and you were sure you were going to ace it until you actually had the test in front of you and realized you didn't know much.  

Students who are engaged in regular formative assessment have much less of that experience.  Not only do you have frequent check-ins with their understanding, so do they.  Is it a bummer to get a question wrong? Yes.  But that is not a reason to abandon a good practice.  When they get it right the next time, call out how far they have come. "Remember when y'all couldn't do that?  Look at you now, doing it well. Thanks for putting in the work." 

There is not much that encourages people to grow like actually seeing their growth. It's why people in weight loss programs weigh themselves. It's why coaches show their teams game footage.  I'll give you another example from my outside-of-school life.  A few months after I started taking cycle classes at the Y, I began setting goals about distance, tension level, and power on the bike.  At first, I only knew how to check these statistics at the end of a class. I was often surprised to get to the end of a workout and find that I hadn’t achieved as much distance as I had thought.  Because I wasn’t tracking that information at all during the class, I didn’t have the ability to make adjustments that would help me reach my goals.  I could do better on a different day, but I didn’t know how to do better at the moment.  Then, an instructor showed me how to use the bike’s computer to see real time information during class by changing the display screen.

Checking the number on that screen was motivating because I knew if I needed to speed up or turn up the tension. I could adjust my course of action based on what I was seeing.

But be careful, you can have too much of a good thing. I found it was tempting to stay on that screen.  After all, feedback is good, right?  We like having constant access to information, but I quickly learned that was unwise.  It made me so focused on the number that I couldn’t pay attention to instructions.  Worse, I was so focused on the number that I couldn’t enjoy doing the things that would improve the number, and I was in a state of panic if the average didn’t move as quickly as I thought it should.  Worst of all, I wasn’t building any internal sense of how to improve because I was relying too much on the bike itself rather than how my legs felt or my perceived level of exertion.  Eventually, I disciplined myself to only visit that screen once every four minutes.  That gave me enough information to figure out what I need to do to make progress for the next four minute check, but it didn’t do my thinking for me.

The same is true in formative assessment. Stop and check at the crucial moments and the hinge information, but don't make them sick of hearing "Take out you whiteboard."

3. The joy of more classroom interaction

I mentioned earlier that it is possible for a student to go through a day without paying attention. It is also possible a for an introverted student to go through a day without having anyone interact with them. One of the best ways to do formative assessment is to require everyone to give an answer. My favorite way of doing this in the past few years was to have each student answer questions on mini-whiteboards. In a quick glance, I can see 24 answers and know if there are several of them with the same misconception. I can see who is taking longer to write their answer and who is copying off of their neighbor. It's great. What I didn't expect was to get so much joy out of their idiosyncrasies.

My favorite example of this was a boy named Jonah. He put on a front of being a cynic and too cool for school. Yet, he was a gifted mathematician and wrote excellent explanations of complex topics. He also had a wry sense of humor, but he never wanted to appear engaged in class, so he didn't use it there. However, he was required to write answers on his whiteboard, leading to some fun moments.

I don't know if this story is going to translate into writing, but I want to give it a shot. One of the things I do early in the year with 8th graders is teach them the names and functions of lab equipment. I explain that on tv, every piece of glassware is called a beaker, but in actual labs, it is important to be precise with your language so you get what you need for the purpose. We then play a game I call, "Beaker - Not a Beaker." The kids spend the rest of the year giving me a hard time by calling beakers flasks and vice versa. So, the first time we used whiteboards for retrieval, Jonah wrote "Beaker" as his answer a couple of times. I finally said, "That's great. You can do that, but you also have to write a real answer." For the rest of the year, he wrote two answers for every question, Beaker and whatever the real answer was. Then, during an exam review, there came a magical moment. I asked a question where the answer actually was "Beaker." He held up his board with, you guessed it, two answers: Beaker and Beaker. I laughed, and he responded with the slightest of smiles. It was a sweet and joyful interaction that I couldn't have planned and that wouldn't have happened if I wasn't regularly engaging in formative assessment with all students.

I hope in these three posts that I have convinced you that there is value in implementing a structured program of formative assessment and given you some practical ways of doing it. If you have a favorite tool for formative assessment, please post them in the comments so everyone can add to their toolbox.