Formative Assessment

This post is about planning formative assessments based on learning objectives. Formative assessments shape instruction by helping teachers check student understanding. They can be quite simple and teachers might choose to incorporate more than one in a lesson.

It helped me to think of my formative assessments as part of a lesson. The lesson below would be a 90 minute English Language Arts block, grades 4-6.

Learning Objective: Students will be able to identify author’s purpose in a literary or informational text.

• Materials: 4-5 short texts.Try to let your selections reflect the variety of fiction and nonfiction: a folktale, a poem, an essay, an article.
• Venn diagram printouts

Lesson: Jigsaw. Students are in small groups. Each group gets a different  short text. Tell students each group is going to try to identify why the person who wrote the text did so, in other words, the author’s purpose. Write author’s purpose on the board. Formative Assessment 1 - Check for understanding by asking the author's purpose in familiar books and stories. Have students individually complete a Venn diagram comparing reasons for writing the text they are about to read, in comparison with possible reasons for writing another book or text they have encountered recently. They can complete this during the class and hand it in at the end as their exit ticket.

Allow ample time for students to read the texts carefully. When the groups report back, question them as to what strategies they used to identify  the author’s purpose. Write How to Tell your Author’s Purpose on poster paper and have students come up and fill in the chart when they give a correct answer.

Formative Assessment 2 - On scratch paper, ask each group to brainstorm 3 DOs and 3 DON’Ts for identifying author’s purpose. Example of student response: DO look at the type of writing it is, look at the kinds of details included, and think about what the writer is trying to say. DON’T be too general, take things out of context, or just look at the pictures.

Release students to Daily 5/independent reading. Formative Assessment 3 - When there are 15-20 minutes remaining, ask students to identify the author’s reason for writing what they read today, and why they think so, in their writing journal.

Briefly wrap up by having 2-3 students share from their journals. Discuss author’s purpose as a class.

Remind students to complete their Venn diagrams as their exit ticket.

Understanding and Applying Standards

I must admit I was previously confused about what standards are for and how educators use them. We use the Common Core State Standards at the school where I work, integrating them with our PYP curriculum framework. I didn't usually use them in my lesson planning as my students aren't at grade level in English and I wasn't familiar enough with the standards to want to go back and find a relevant one from an earlier grade level. If I was asked to include a standard in my lesson plan, I would simply search for a standard that seemed to match the lesson I had already planned, and paste it into my lesson plan.

Unpacking Standards

Now I understand how standards are used for goal-based planning. The first stop is breaking the standard down into more useful chunks: skills and big ideas. The nouns in the standard help us identify the big ideas, while the verbs tell us the skills students will need to meet the standard. For example, in this grade 4 reading standard, we can see that students will need to refer, explain, and infer. From the nouns: text, details, examples, inferences, we can figure our big idea is going to be something about how a text is organized logically-how details and examples are used to support larger ideas.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.1
Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

Planning through Backwards Mapping

These skills and big ideas provide objectives for student success in a unit planned around this standard. Working backwards, the teacher can then plan lessons and assessments designed to help students reach the objectives. For one example, we can see that in order to develop the skill of making inferences, students will need to be able to connect ideas within and across texts. Now we have more specific skills to teach and assess.

SMART Objectives

To ensure that our objectives are serving our students, we try to make them Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Targeted.  SMART objectives for the skill above might include describe the development of an idea over the course of a text or compare and contrast two similar ideas from two different texts. Lessons should move students toward higher-order levels of thinking according to Bloom's taxonomy, and the language we use in our planning can help us remember that. If we want students to be able to analyze a text, rather than just remember "details support the main idea", we should use verbs like analyze, break down, compare, contrast, identify, and infer.

Objective-based Planning

Every lesson should have a clear, specific objective. Standards help us identify those objectives, as well as providing their context, giving us both the micro and macro view. Standards aid coherent unit and lesson planning by giving us some idea where we are trying to go and some signs to look for along the way.

Backwards Mapping

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.4.4

Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

I chose to work backwards from this grade 4 ELA writing standard. I co-teach ELL students in grades 4 and 5, and they are usually at least two grade levels behind in ELA. If I actually want to teach a unit like this, I might have redo it for a similar grade 2 standard. Anyway, several of the assessments we use regularly in my department use grade-level standards and normative data from U.S. students, so I want to at least see what grade level looks like.

Getting a piece of writing to cohere depends on multiple independent proficiencies. We’re going to start by identifying the proficiencies the students will need to meet the standard.

3 Proficiencies:

• Recognize and write complete sentences. Know the parts of speech needed to make a complete sentence.
• Organize sentences into paragraphs. Recognize themes and topics in others’ writing, as well as their own.
• Identify task, purpose, and audience in others’ writing. Be able to write in a variety of fiction and nonfiction forms. Produce writing that meets restraints/criteria according to directions.

Next, some assessments that will help us determine student development in these proficiencies.

3 Assessments:

• First stating their purpose, audience, topic, and theme, students will write and edit a multi-paragraph essay  on space.
• Peer-edit a classmate’s paper for grammar, mechanics, and paragraph structure.
• Respond to a fiction or nonfiction text in a journal entry that includes an argument for author’s purpose, intended audience, and possible theme.
• 

Finally, 3 learning experiences that will help students develop the proficiencies.

3 learning experiences:

• Read texts that represent a variety of purposes and intended audiences: letters, poems, essays, information reports, editorials, speeches, and others.
• Diagram sentences, learning to distinguish parts of speech. Review with grammar games.
• Create a poster, glog, or presentation that examines a theme in literature or collects writing around a theme.

This is just for starters. Many more activities and assessments would go into such a unit, and teaching fourth graders to write up to the standard would probably take a lot longer than one unit, at least based on my experience. I wonder if a standard like this could be broken up and peppered throughout ELA and science, and social studies unit all year, assessments included, so that students have met the standard by the end of the year?