September 2006 — Features
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Formative Assessment :: Building a Better Student
Christine Leydon, systems training assistant for the Broome-Tioga Board of Cooperative Educational Services, which serves 15 school districts across upstate New York, is an Acuity user. She says she knew “we pretty much had to sell it to teachers. Who better to sell to teachers than other teachers?” So four teachers per grade level for language arts and mathemathics created assessments using a question bank of more than 20,000 items. They then trained all their fellow teachers in how to use Acuity. Once the teachers realized that after developing the assessments, their work was virtually done—the tests would be scanned and scored automatically—and once they saw that the reports Acuity generates would allow them to easily identify students’ particular academic needs, they embraced the program.
Broadly speaking, summative assessment answers the question “How did I do?”; formative assessment answers the question "How am I doing?"
Multiple Choices
Some assessment technologies work with questions asked orally. Consider InterWrite PRS by GTCO CalComp. PRS stands for personal response system: Each student holds a compact, infrared wireless transmitter. The teacher asks a question, and the students respond by pressing buttons on their transmitters. The signals are sent to a PRS receiver, which forwards them to a computer. At the end of the session, the teacher has a statistical summary of the responses in addition to a record of individual responses. The software also includes a function for creating quizzes consisting of several types of questions, including numeric with decimal points, fractions, and positive and negative numbers; multiple choice; true/false; rank order; multiple correct; and short answer.
Some assessment technologies work with essay questions, too. LearningExpress, for example, partnered with Miami-Dade County Public Schools to improve student performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) Writing+ assessment. Students’ writing assessments were directly aligned with the FCAT Writing+. Each student essay was scored professionally and returned to the district within three days of its processing. More than 35,000 essays have been scored, and student responses, essay results, and diagnostic feedback are available online to administrators and teachers for analysis, targeted remediation, and tracking. Some of the programs already touched on, such as Acuity, will soon be able to record and score essays as well as multiplechoice items.
What all of these formative assessment technologies do, in one form or another, is provide useful information to both teacher and student. Although the information often arrives instantly, the benefits are seen over time. Indeed, as Orange County’s Lee Baldwin says, change is indeed a process, one that’s producing ever more interesting tools for educators looking to make instruction as meaningful, as efficient, and as effective as possible.
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Neal Starkman is a freelance writer based in Seattle, WA.
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