TE 408: Formative Assessment Practices

Syllabus Assignment Description: An analysis of student work through a

formative assessment task that you collect when you teach in Mr. Pineda’s
class (for example, a bell ringer or exit ticket).

Points: 20

Due Date: You must turn in this assignment on one of the three “check in”
dates: February 12, March 18, and April 8.

Background: In TE 407, we talked briefly about formative assessment. We

also talked about the importance of bell ringers and exit slips as important
moments in a lesson where both teachers and students can get a clearer sense
of how the learning is going. Finally, we talked about the importance of
always providing a clear task for students to perform during all activities
(such as a lecture guide during a lecture). Noticing what students are doing
during a lesson and using that observation to guide future instruction is at the
heart of formative assessment.

Focus: Each of you will teach in Ben’s class, from bell to bell, one time
during the spring semester. Your planning for that lesson will largely take
place between you and Ben (though we are happy to provide any advice you
may want to ask us for).

This is an important experience because it is the one time you get to “go
live” before an entire class with a lesson of your own design prior to your
student teaching internship. Dealing with your own emotions will be a big
part of that experience. Seeing how things go from the drawing board to the
classroom is another big part of that experience. But we also have as a goal
that you leave the lesson with some sense of how the lesson went for the
students—what they learned and experienced as a result of your instruction.

To that end, we would ask that each of you build in multiple formative
assessment tasks to your lessons. Many formative assessment practices are
informal—they are simply the teacher listening into a small group discussion
or noticing the degree to which students appear to understand and engage
with your material. Other formative assessments are a bit more concrete—
we ask the students to do or write something that we can collect and analyze
at a later point in time. Graphic organizers, online bulletin boards or quizzes,
writing samples, and short daily quizzes are examples of this type of
formative assessment practice. Please look over this article for a review of
strong formative assessment practices.

For this lesson, we would like you to collect small, concrete student input
and response that you can analyze after the lesson is over. Where possible,
have students include their names so you can link levels of understanding
with individual students.

Once you have collected the student input and responses, look through them.
Consider and write up responses to the following questions:

• What were my goals/learner outcomes for the lesson?

Identify the importance of antebellum events such as bleeding Kansas,
political decisions like the Missouri compromise and fugitive slave act, and
demonstrating their understanding of how these events lead into the Civil
War.

• What was my formative assessment strategy?

After completing the gallery walk of different primary source materials such
as political cartoons, maps, and quotes, students were tasked with
individually creating their own artifacts that related to at least one theme or
idea that was presented during the gallery walk or from going over the
lecture notes.

• Do the student work samples suggest my goals/learner outcomes were

met? To what degree and by what percentage of the students?
Out of the twenty-three work samples I collected, five of them I would
consider to be unsatisfactory due to there being no attempt or little effort
being put into it. The rest of the assignments were able to complete the first
part of the leaner outcomes, which was identifying a event or idea from the
lecture notes and creating a artifact about it, while only another ten or so
students were able to complete the second goal which was to connect it to
the Civil War.
 • What student misconceptions are evident in the student work
samples? What might you do in a future lesson to address those
misconceptions?
To be honest, there were no real major misconceptions that I saw in the
student work I received. I think that is largely due to the fact that since they
were creating their own ‘primary sources’ like slogans, drawings, and maps,
it seems like students were much more likely to put too little effort into their
work as opposed to putting something factually wrong on the paper. I did
notice that the students who created maps were not totally correct on how
the nation was divided by free and slave states, and that a few other students
correctly identified that slavery was bad but failed to connect it specifically
to the events/topics that were discussed in class. Since this was the first time
the student were hearing the lecture notes, I think doing what Ben normally
does and go back over them more in depth at a later date would most likely
be enough for students to think a little deeper about the content.

• What strengths are evident in the student work samples?

The biggest strength that I noticed was how the students collectively were
able to demonstrate that they understood that each of the primary sources
they examined in the gallery walk had multiple possible interpretations that
can relate to different aspects of the lecture notes. For example, two students
who created a political cartoon of people in Kansas voting, one focused
more on the importance and role of popular sovereignty, while another
focused on the moral problems of slavery expanding into the Kansas
territory.

• Is my formative assessment strategy a clear and accurate picture of

what students know and can do? Or did some students fail to put
forward their best efforts? What can be done to improve your
formative assessment strategy in the future?
Overall, I think a vast majority of students put in some level of effort into
their exit tickets. Even in cases where students maybe didn’t go all the way
to connecting their work back to the notes, most of the time it was made up
for by the creativity they put into their assignments which I think is also
something that is important encourage in these formative assessments so that
you can get a better idea of if students are individually able to come up with
different interpretations of the content. Only two students outright did not do
any work, and another three students submitted work that was ‘low effort’
and did not really follow the instructions. If I was to assign this kind of
formative assessment where I’m asking students to make some kind of
creative artifact, I would definitely try to give them more time (preferably 5-
6 minutes instead of 3-4), because while I noticed that a decent number of
students were able to start creating something right away, the reduced
amount of time put some students on the spot and in my opinion was not
enough to get an accurate picture of what they know and can demonstrate.

• If this were your class, would you assign a grade to the work you
received? Would you return it to students with feedback (with or
without a grade)? Or would you simply use it to inform your own
teaching? Any of these alternatives are reasonable. Talk about how
you would or would not link grades and feedback to your formative
assessment.
If I were to do this for a class I taught, I would want to make it worth
probably one point and award it if the student at least made an attempt to
complete the exit ticket. My personal belief is that anything I collect from
the students (in general) should be worth at least a small amount of points
for two reasons, the first being that it allows students to be ‘rewarded’ for
their effort and I would like their grade to reflect that, but secondly it does
promote some accountability with students when they know that even the
little things (like exit tickets) in class are worth making an effort to
complete. At the same time, I know it’s not really practical to grade and give
feedback for all students every time there is a exit ticket activity, which goes
back to why I would make it worth a point for completion, and I would only
give feedback to the class if there was a reoccurring misconception that was
in their work.

• Was anything surprising about the work you received? If so, what?

I think the biggest thing that surprised me was the amount of high-quality
work that I received despite the relatively short amount of time the students
were given to complete their exit tickets. While I was trying to do my best to
give them more time to put more effort into their work (but the lesson took
longer than expected), the fact that so many were able to create quality work
right away in some ways can be indicative of their comfort in their
understanding of the material that was covered in class.
Assessment: We will assess your work using the following checklist. If you
have a suggestion for how to alter our checklist in order to assess your work
more fairly and accurately, please let us know!

__/7 Strategy: Your formative assessment strategy gives you accurate and
valuable information in relationship to the achievement of your desired
goals/learning outcomes. The strategy is one that students find interesting
and engaging.

__/8 Strengths and Weaknesses of Student Work: You analyze the strengths
and weaknesses in the student work samples (including student
misconceptions).

__/8 Connection to Future Teaching: Your ideas for how you would use the
results of your formative assessment practice to inform future instruction are
well reasoned and grounded in the evidence you collected.

__/4 Grades: You provide a reasoned response as to how you would fit this
formative assessment performance into your daily routine--that is, you
provide a compelling rationale for the question of how you would approach
grading and giving feedback on the student work sample.