So now what? Formative Assessment

A little review of the whole process of my quick formative assessments. I would teach one or two lessons, then give students a quick formative assessment quiz over those topics to see student understanding. This formative assessment did not count against their grade, it was purely to see their knowledge and give them feedback on what to continue to work on. If a student scored lower than a 3 (which on my scale is proficient), they would come in for a reteaching of the target before the summative assessment. 

This process had its pros and cons, but overall I felt the students embraced this process and feel the data shows just that. Most students improved over the course of the unit and performed better on their summative assessments. This helped eliminate retakes after the summative assessment, helping to move the class along at the same pace. I fully expect to continue to use this process with a few tweaks next year, but the question is should I expand this into my other classes next year?

I plan to expand this process into my Algebra 1 class next year, and then follow it with my 7th grade class the year after. The biggest hurdle I am going to face next year is how to use my time management skills for these re-teachings outside of class. It was tough allowing students to schedule their own time slots, as they would procrastinate. I found the most success when I gave my Algebra 2 students a deadline for scheduling their own advisory times, but if they chose not to schedule I would schedule for them. I plan to make certain days specific for each class so that my advisory time (a study hall time at the end of the day) is not overrun with several students and I am able to best serve the students in the room. 

I anticipate with my Algebra 1 students being younger learners to have to walk them through this process more than my Algebra 2 students. This may help my time management, but could also take the student ownership out of the process. I look forward to seeing how it worked in these other classes next year and hope it has as much success as I had with my Algebra 2 students this past year, below is a QR code to my reflection over the process on my flipgrid presentation!

The Data: Formative Assessments

I am going to go over the data from the second quarter. I will be comparing the scores of individual students and also compare the class average on the formative vs the summative.  I want to start by making it clear this is just data from 2 class sections for a total of 26 students, mathematically this can be insignificant, but for me this information was important to making changes to the process as we went into the second semester. 

Below is a scores grid, I have highlighted improved scores from the QC to the summative assessment, or a perfect score on both. If you view the data, generally over half of the class would improve between the two assessments. This view of the data gave me confidence that the students were getting something out of the process as they were improving their knowledge in some way between the two assessments. This score sheet also shows how/if the class average went up between the two, again over half of the targets had an increase, I would have preferred to see more of the class averages increasing. Two of the chapters the last learning target did not have much success. I am curious to dig into this further next year if it is just the topic of the target or if it is the turnaround between initial learning and summative assessment. 

Looking at Learning Target 4.1. This was one of the sections that due to the class average I planned a whole class reteaching. Based on the improvements from the formatative to the summative assessment, identifying the topics of struggle for all students is very important to student success. I feel more confident in identifying those and coming up with more engaging lessons to help students with the understanding.

This is just a snapshot of my class in one quarter of one year, but seeing the data makes me confident that this process has shown success. I really look forward to adjusting a few aspects of it, to reach more students in the process.