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.