Last Spring the PWR ran an awesome workshop on equity-oriented assessment (check out the vlog recap here). One important thing Gin and Anselma brought up in that workshop is the idea that grading is not the only form of assessment. Summative assessment is when we give students final grades or grades and feedforward on written assignments. In these instances, we are making a judgment or evaluation about the ways students are demonstrating the content we’re trying to teach them. Formative assessment is more of a reciprocal process where we check in with students about their progress and comprehension as we go. Formative assessment is an important part of equity oriented assessment because it allows us to meet students where they are and helps give students the language and space to articulate their needs.
If you and I have talked even passingly about teaching, there are two things you’ve probably heard me say about my teaching: 1) that I aim to be as transparent as possible with my students about my teaching goals and how I hope to achieve them and 2) that I see teaching as an ongoing process of learning and unlearning. I believe that teaching should be dynamic and mutable in order to reach our students’ diverse and ever-changing needs. This is why I think formative assessment is so important; because it allows us to check in with students to get a better sense of their learning needs and how our material is being received. From there, we can tweak our material and approach to meet each specific class’s needs.
If we’re thinking about the university writing classroom as a genre, how can we effectively teach students to navigate this genre? Toward this end, you may want to incorporate some form of formative assessment when introducing prompts, when students receive feedforward from you or their peers, or when assigning particularly dense or long readings. These activities are also important to developing a shared vocabulary of assessment. What language do you want to give students and what language are they already using effectively?
This means that formative assessment and how it (re)shapes our class planning will look different for each instructor and each group of students. Still, there are a few tried and true activities that I constantly depend on and would like to share with you.
- Clear & fuzzy: there are various different ways to implement this one, but the general idea is the same: students name one thing about a lecture/prompt/activity/class session that is really clear to them. And one thing that they’re still fuzzy on and could use some clarity. You could do this as a quick write that you collect, a pair and share activity, or any other format that makes sense for your purposes.
- Ticket out the door: at the end of a class session you ask students to do some sort of reflection about the day’s work, which they turn in to you as their ticket to leave class for the day. This is especially useful on those days you wrap up early.
- Finger scales: ask students to use their hands to show you on a scale of 1-5 how they feel about their comprehension of a concept or reading. 1 being not super confident and would like some to spend some more time thinking/talking through as a class and 5 being very comfortable in their knowledge and ready to move on.
- Co-writing rubrics: Once you’ve introduced a prompt, it can be useful to ask students to co-write or revise an existing rubric from that assignment. That way you can ensure all of you are on the same page when it comes to the summative assessment you will give and the way they will read and workshop their peers’ work.
- Formative assessment is built into most of our PWR classes. Things like writer’s memos and conferences give instructors the opportunity to check in with their students about things that may apply to that particular student, assignment, unit, or sequence.
How do you go about formative assessment in your classes? How do those ideas differ from or build upon the work you do with summative assessment?