Formative Assessments

I recently learned what a formative assessment is. A formative assessment is to provide feedback for students on their progress without assessing a grade to it. It provides students feedback on their progress in their learning, understanding, skills, and attitudes. This assessment is not just for the students though. This is also a chance for the teacher to learn about how well their teaching methods are working. It helps the teacher look at what has been learned, how well it was learned, and if anything else needs to be retouched upon. There are many ways that this could be handled, but one important idea is that this is meant to provide feedback and guidance instead of judgement and grades. A formative assessment is beneficial in the fact that it allows students and teachers learn where progress has been made and what progress still needs to be made. Technology tools can be used to do complete this assessment. Email could be used to discuss the progress and assessment between teachers and students. Another way is to use Google Docs to create an anonymous survey so that students can fill it out about your teaching methods, and you could create a document or survey that allows you to tell each student individually about their progress and assessment. One last thought is to create an Excel worksheet that gives an encouragement in certain areas and have it filled out anonymously by each student for your assessment as a teacher and you fill one out for each student. The only problem is that the last one can be accidently seen as a grade like scale which is not the goal of the assessment. The most important thing to remember is this is about feedback instead of judgement and grades. As long as that is done in a professional manner, it can be very beneficial to the students, the teacher, and the class as a whole.