My goal this school year was to create an ungraded assessment after the initial lessons as a formative assessment for Algebra 2 students. The idea was to allow and show two things, the first was to show me as a teacher how well the students were understanding the material and the second was for the student to be able to check their own knowledge level on the standards based grading scale. These ideas of reflection for both the teacher and the student was great for helping with student engagement, and student reflection of learning. If after the formative assessment the student scored lower than a 3 on my standard based scale they would be responsible for coming in outside of class to go over their mistakes and relearn the material. If the majority of students scored low we would do this reteaching as a whole class.
The first goal of getting the teacher, myself, to reflect on how well lessons went and how the class did at comprehension had positive and negative outcomes. When I was able to stay in a good rhythm of teaching, I tried to give quick check quizzes on Fridays. This allowed me to look and see how the class did as a whole before planning the next week of lessons. I would look at the results from these quizzes and would do a whole class reteaching if more than 50% of students scored lower than a 3 on the original quick check quiz. This worked well and there were only a few instances in Algebra 2 where I had to do this. Finding the right amount of lessons to do the formative assessment was a learning curve, and I have settled on 2 to 3 lessons at a time. A negative side of this happened when multiple classes would have assessment land on the same time table. I felt using this threshold of 50% helped me to plan engaging original lessons and also having different ideas of reteaching already prepared and integrated these into the first lesson.
The second goal for students to be able to reflect on their learning also had both positive and negative outcomes. Response from students was that they liked the quick check quizzes because it showed them what to expect on the summative assessment. Some also said it helped them know which lessons they would need to do extra studying on to do well by the time of the overall unit assessment. What I found as the year continued was students started to not give their best effort on these formative assessments and that would affect the overall class outcome. Due to time constraints, I was still working on finding ways to hold students more accountable on coming in for the reteaching session outside of class time. Some students mentioned when given a reflection over the quick checks that they wish they could “get out” of the final assessment if they scored a 4 on the quick check as they had already shown their knowledge on the subject, my response was if they had the knowledge one week they should still have the knowledge to receive a 4 the next time I assessed them. This final idea is still something I am reflecting on.
Overall, I saw that I was able to use the formative data to create better lessons. I feel with more time to integrate this into my classroom I hope to be able to get better student buy-in from students to try their best on these assessments even if they do not affect their grade. Those students who used the system the way I had intended it typically saw improvement from the quick check quiz to the actual graded assessment and were most successful in the class as a whole. If this is something that has interested you, I will be continuing to dive a little deeper in the process and the reflection I collected from students in my next blog post!
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