Black & William describe Formative Assessment as “all those activities undertaken by teachers, and by their students in assessing themselves, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes “formative assessment” when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs.”

This short video shows the importance of formative assessments in a classroom and how they help teachers change and focus their curriculum to better suit their students.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL54bfmZPzY

Formative Assessments help the students understand

where they are headed, where they are right now, and how

they close the gap in the area that they do not understand.

Formative Assessments allow teachers to facilitate student learning and helps the student to close the gap when there is misunderstanding about a topic because the students are given the feedback to help move their

learning forward.

JOURNALS

My students have 3 journals in their desks; one for math, one for reading and one for

S.S. and Science. We use these journals daily. I have the

students write, draw, explain, and even

question content in these journals.

This was one of their journal assignments.

We read a story together

and I modeled “thinking out loud”.

We then read another story, we did

this process together. On day 3 this was their

independentpractice. The storieschallenged them to ‘think outside of the

box.’

This was a child’s verison of a poem. I asked themto draw a small sketch that went along with each stanza after we had

discussed the poem as a class.This was an easy way for me to check their understanding of the poem.

The students were asked to relate

their background knowledge

to what they read in the poem.

I also encourage my students

to question what their reading

and ask them to write out their thoughts.

These are both examples of quick formative

assessments.We studied both the solar

systemand the parts of a plant.

Thesesimple drawings helped me

evaluateeach child’s understanding very quickly. They were not graded. I leave small notes and comments to help the students understand how

they can correct the issues and grow in their

understanding.

This was a KWL chart that I had

my students complete after an intense study of

the voting process and the two

candidates. We also followed this study by having

the students participate in a

mock election that included the

students having to register, the

ballets, booths, and the I VOTED

stickers.

RUBRICS

MCLASS RUBRICSSummary Writing Rubrics

Journal Writing Rubrics

EXIT SLIPS