Types of assessments
Diagnostic assessment
Performance assessment
Summative assessment
Formative Assessment
What is it?
Formative assessment refers to a wide variety of methods that teachers use to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or course.
Why is it used?
It is used to help teachers identify weak areas that students may struggle with and therefore, can adjust their lesson, instructional techniques or academic support. For students, it helps identify their strength and weaknesses and use the formative feedback to make revisions to their work and their approaches to it.
Exit Tickets: To collect student response and feedback. Based on their response, the teacher can modify future lessons to address concepts that students may have failed to comprehend.
Entrance Tickets: Check students’ prior knowledge on a subject or what they retained from previous lesson. Similar to exit tickets, the teacher can use it to adjust lessons and identify areas that they need more/less focus on.
Student Work: Teachers can provide specific, detailed, and constructive feedback on certain work, such as: journals, draft essays, worksheets, projects, ungraded quizzes, works of art or performances. The student can use this feedback to review and revise their final product.
By Lyn Wilcox
CEM - Baseline testing (usually conducted at the start of the year) and provides data on a student's educational level (in Maths and English) with particular reference to their age.
PiRA - English Reading standardised assessment
WIDA - Standardised language proficiency test for EAL learners
Final Project: an assignment/project based task designed to see what was taught/learnt through demonstration/presentation
A mid-term Exam/Final Exam: Really then get to see if all that was taught was learnt and can be applied
Allow the instructor to identify and refine which teaching methods illicit the best retention.
The focus is on measuring a students ability to use their learned skills and not recollection of knowledge.
Performance assessments evaluate a students understanding of the content and ability to apply learned skills to specific situations.
More information about Formative Assessments:
https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-formative-assessment-strategies-examples.html
PUMA - Maths standardised assessment
A good assessment:
Ipsative assessments
A two-stage testing process- e.g. record student's reading in the beginning of the school year and listen to it at the end of the school year and discuss what improvements have been made
PBL - e.g. have students develop an individual business plan that can benefit the school
Portfolios - e.g. have art students draw self portraits every month and compare their progress monthly
Ipsative assessments are one of the types of assessment as learning that compares existing performance with previous performance motivating students to set goals and improve their skills.
Ipsative assessment teaches students that learning is a process.
By Satenik Hakobyan
”Ipsative” assessments place a primacy upon the individual, and on the individual development.
[More on Ipsative assessment](https://www.institute4learning.com/2020/03/05/10-things-educators-should-know-about-ipsative-assessments/)
By Jay Roberts
More on Summative Assessments (https://study.com/teach/summative-assessments.html)
Summative assessments are designed to assess both the effectiveness of a program and the learning of the participant. They are used more so than less, at the end of a unit taught.
It is usually called an assessment of learning and it evaluates learning by comparing learning to a standard benchmark.
By Sitso Rubeau
Diagnostic Assessments are a type of pre-evaluation test that is administered to determine what the students' baseline knowledge is and can provide benchmarks over time. This form of assessment also allows the teacher to ascertain a students' areas for improvement and their strengths for a particular unit or subject. These assessments can be informal or standardised (graded).
KWL - Know, Want to Learn, Have Learned - This is usually a chart filled in by students at the beginning of a new unit or lesson to identify what they know about the topic already. It also helps identify what students want to learn in order to help direct what is taught/covered in the unit. Learned is completed at the end of the lesson to capture what students have learned. This is not a graded activity.
By Matthew Bradley
Uses relatable content
Include multiple stages of product completion.
Allow for self evaluation
Testing standards are obvious to the student
Regularly reassessed
Benefits of performance assessment:
Pique students interest
Accurate indicators of students ability
Increase instructor confidence by refining and improving upon lesson plans
Do not need to be graded