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Formative Assessment 2018 1
Formative Assessment 2018 1
Kenneth Plont
Social Studies
11/14/18
4. Formative Assessment
Students in my eighth grade classes have been doing a unit on the Articles of
Confederation for the past few weeks. Throughout this unit, I have understood better, as an
educator, how to implement and utilize formative assessments in my classroom to check for
trimester, I have neglected to give at least two quizzes or formative assessments throughout a
unit prior to the unit test, and this time around, I planned for two quizzes and students seemed to
My claim is that I have improved in the last year since beginning student teaching in fall
2017 at utilizing and implementing formative assessments in the classroom and seeing how that
ultimately has an effect on test scores across the classes that I’m teaching.
The evidence is that students scored averages of 83% in 3rd period, 82% in sixth period ,
68% in 8th period, their previous assessment over their declaration of independence unit. On
their single quizzes over the French and Indian War, the classes average about 70% among all
three classes. Their quiz scores on “British policy” averaged about 58% to 69% in one class. This
demonstrated to me that kids needed more focused and frequent formative assessments to check
for understanding and to provide feedback to each individual student on their progress and
assessment rolls around for the eighth graders. On this second quiz over the Articles of
Confederation the class averages were: 92% in third period, 92% in sixth period, 100% in 8th
period. For the first quiz over the articles of confederation, students scored an average of 75% in
third period, 77% in sixth period and 65% in eighth period. For the second formative assessment,
scores went up nearly 15% in two of the classes and roughly 35% in the last class! To me, this
proves that the more formative assessments that are given, the better the students do and the
better feedback I can provide for them. Prior, the students were only exposed to test-like
questions through rote memorization review games, but through the quizzes and writing “do
beneficial to student performance on the unit test and their overall understanding of the concepts,
facts and information that they’re learning everyday in the classroom. Overall, since last year,
I’ve learned how to effectively and efficiently implement formative assessments and use them to
gauge student understand. Beyond that, I’ve grown in the sense that I understand how to provide
adequate feedback to students in order to ensure a more enduring understanding of content and
how to adjust my instruction. Utilizing formative assessments more effectively has also lead to
improved lesson progression and design. Since I’ve gained a clearer understanding on how to use
formative assessments in the classroom, I’ve been able to more cohesively design the
progression of a unit and where formative assessments fit into that unit design. This is crucial for