Formative Assessment

On a New Zealand Primary Teachers' online forum, teachers were asked what formative procedures they used to measure reading. The usual felons were trotted out; eAsTTle, PAT's, IPI's, STAR, PROBE and PaCT. I was interested in the fact that a number of teachers responded that they used all these in their formative assessment, which raised a number of concerns. 

Formal Testing: In-house professional testing informed me that formal testing provides a snapshot at a particular point in time of what a student can do, what gaps they may have, and some possible next steps in their learning process. However, to form an overall judgement of a student's capabilities, we require more data.

Overall Teacher Judgements (OTJ's): When we make these we have a variety of data we can refer to. We can refer to daily lessons, notes in our modelling books, self-assessments, assessment tasks, peer reviews, and our anecdotal evidence. This might include student exemplars, teacher notes from discussions or lessons, or students self-evaluations. Maybe a summative assessment task may be set and from those results we can compare and contrast our data. 


A Testing Regime:  With the introduction of National Standards teachers were provided with indicators against which we could measure a student's progress. However none of the formal assessment tools are designed to indicate how a student is performing against the standards. They are designed to measure performance against the NZ Curriculum. Much debate has raged over the fact that the two documents don't exactly line up, but I don't see that as a weakness. Rather, the Standards provide a set of indicators where students can be measured to see whether they are below, at or above National Standards. I have been in schools where staff have tried to say that Level 2P is below and Level 3B is at but those statements will only be true for a short period. If I test a student in March, and report on progress in May, my e-AsTTle data will be out of date. 

Formative assessment should not consist solely of formal tests. Formal tests provide data that measures performance on a given date. They only give a snapshot.






https://www.cmu.edu/.../basics/formative-summative.html

Formative vs Summative Assessment - Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation - Carnegie...

The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments:

CMU.EDU|BY CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY