Formative Assessment in Practice

Description

Formative assessment is one of the most well-supported interventions in the research on effective teaching, and one of the most inconsistently implemented in actual classrooms. The gap is usually not awareness — most teachers know what formative assessment is — but practice. Translating the concept into specific, low-burden, high-yield routines that fit into regular lesson delivery is where the difficulty lies.

This module focuses entirely on that translation. It covers what formative assessment is actually trying to accomplish, what techniques generate the most useful information, and how to build a classroom practice around it that doesn’t require significant additional preparation time.

You’ll work with:

• Assessment purpose: distinguishing between assessment for learning and assessment of learning, and why the difference matters for instructional decision-making
• Technique selection: matching assessment method to learning objective and classroom context
• Response protocols: what to do with the information formative assessment generates — adjusting pace, re-teaching, grouping, and moving on

Timeline: +/- 4 hours

Outcome: A working formative assessment practice built into regular lesson delivery — generating the student understanding data needed to make instruction more responsive without adding significant load to lesson preparation.