Formative Assessment - Research Paper Example

?Running Head: Formative Assessment Insert Insert Insert Introduction This research paper is about a formative assessment using course materials, outside research and personal experience. According to Tuttle (2010), a formative assessment is an assessment that is specifically intended to generate feedback. The assessment can be used to improve and accelerate students learning. In most of such assessments the students are not given grades, instead they are given feedback which can help them improve their learning or can be used by the teacher to improve his teaching tactics to enhance learning. In this paper, I describe how I will create a formative assessment for a class I will be teaching and the role the psychometric models will play in my creation of the assessment. Moreover, I explain how I will use observation situation in my assessment and discuss the challenges I expect to encounter during creation of my assessment. 1. Creating a formative assessment for my class According to Brookhart (2010), it is necessary to organizing a formative assessment as a regular part of a learning instruction. The formative assessment will be organized in such a way that it will be incorporated into my teaching instructions. Before creating it, I will first decide what its purpose will be by selecting a formative assessment strategy that will serve my intended purpose better. I will then apply the formative assessment strategy I have selected to choose particular learning goals I will be assessing in my formative assessment. In addition, I will select what I will look for as my students undertake the assessment. Together we will think about how this assessment will help us in improving the learning process. Formative assessment chain consists of four activities which are: taking student response, monitoring the response, diagnose this response, share feedback based on this diagnose, helping student to use this feedback to learn better (Tuttle, 2010). In designing my formative assessment, I aim to consider all the four activities. I will first put into consideration the students’ responses based on what I suspect their learning skills and abilities are when selecting what to assess and how to assess it. After this, I will design a method that I can use to diagnose their response so that I can be able to determine their strength, weakness, and abilities. Then I will share the feedback from diagnose with my students and lastly using my knowledge and experience I will help my students to use this feedback to improve their learning. My formative assessment will have three components that are the feed-up, feedback and feed-forward. The main aim of feed-up will be to ensure that my students will always understand the purpose of the assignments, tasks, and lessons in use as part of my assessment. According to Frey and Fisher (2010), purpose drives both feedback and feed-forward. Thus, by ensuring that my students understand what they do and what they come across, I am certain I will be able to obtain accurate feedback that will be easy to implement in my feed-forward. I will use the feedback to obtain the information about the strengths and needs of my students. I will also use them to provide my students with this information. My main source of feedbacks will be assignments outcomes, observing how my students undertake the tasks, and assessing those tasks. I will observe how they learn during lessons. Most of this feedback will be in data form and, thus, they will require analysis and interpretation. I will use my statistical analysis and statistical modeling to enhance my understanding of this data to give my students feedback that is as accurate as possible. I will use my feed-forward to guide my students’ learning based on the feedback I obtain from their performance data. In this component, I will put into consideration the students’ strengths, needs and weaknesses to design a teaching framework that can improve the learning of my students. In addition, I will be helping students to understand their learning styles so that they can be able to improve their learning. 2. The role psychometric models in the creation of my assessment According to Sternberg and Kaufman (2011), a psychometric model is a type of model that summarizes the variation in score tests in terms of hidden traits presumed to be descriptive of basic psychological process underlying the various ways that cognitive skills can be assessed. The psychometric model that I will be using most times is the g-VPR model. In this model g stands for general reasoning, V for language skills, P for perceptual analytic and R for rotation (Sternberg & Kaufman, 2011). This model will play a very great role, as it will help me to analyze most of the hidden traits in the students I will analyze. I will use this model in ranking and comparing my students using the assumption that this traits might be linearly ordered. I will also use them to obtain my students total scores and in predicting their future performance. For easier analysis and prediction, I will fit my psychometric model to data as a general linear model. The general linear models that I will use most of the times are logistic and probity regression models, conditional multinomial logistic regression model and log-linear models. The major advantage of using GLM framework to fit a psychometric model is that they ease the process of analysis and interpretation of data and enable prediction from the data (Millsap & Olivares, 2009). Hence, the use of these models will make the process of analyzing the various data I obtain in my assessment easier and thus enhancing the kind of feedback and feed-forward I give to my students. They will also enable me to predict future performance of a particular student using the performance data I obtain in the assessments and thus enable me to decide how to assist the students to improve their learning. 3. Use observation situation in my formative assessment Observation situation will be the major way I will use to collect performance data of my students. In this case, I will observe my students directly as they do my work and as they progress on questioning and discussing program I will have formulated for them. Using this I will be certain to obtain most current and accurate data about the ability and weaknesses of my students during the assessment. This will enable me to design learning and teaching strategies that can develop the learning abilities of the students as well as help them to counter their weaknesses. I will use standardized direct observation to quantify samples of learning behavior of my students. According to Bray and Kehle (2011), the advantage of this method is that it enables quantification of relatively small sample of behavior although they must include multiple or repeated data points for them to be accurate. The quantification which will be enabled by this method will greatly help me in understanding micro-learning behaviors among my students and, thus, be able to decide how I can help each one of them to improve his learning skills. I will be using this kind of observation and quantification to design a direction for my future lessons. I understand that to do this I will need to be certain about knowledge, understanding, and skills that my students lack. To be able to do this I will use the performance data collected and the psychometric models to understand the data. 4. Expected challenges I expect several challenges during creation and implementation process of my formative assessment. One of the challenges I anticipate is encountering a large student’s population in a class. Due to the difference in personality in this high population, several micro-level learning behavior that can be difficult to assess are likely to be found. This can also make a teacher unable to adjust his teaching strategies to suite particular student’s need. To counter this challenge I plan to design a good combination of both individualized and group assessments to use in assessing my students. I will encourage my students to try and apply other forms of learning to supplement the in-class learning process. Another challenge that I anticipate is having a group of less focused students. They may lack on how they can improve themselves and whose aim is just to complete schooling. This kind of students might not cooperate fully in the formative assessment thus making the teacher obtain wrong or misleading information during any of the assessment stages. This, in most cases, can make the teacher’s efforts to improve their learning be unfruitful and thus the assessment goals failing to be achieved. To counter this challenge I intend to use few minutes at the beginning of my lessons to offer guidance and counseling to my students about the importance of education and the joy of achieving one’s education goals. Conclusion A formative assessment is paramount in an effort to improve student’s learning. This gives a reason why it should be included in the day-to-day learning instruction. It consists of three components that are the feed-up, feedback and feed-forward that must be combined effectively if success is to be achieved. Psychometric models can be used in the creation of such assessments to summarize the variation in test scores thus enabling generation of a reliable feedback. Moreover, this psychometric model can fit into GLM to enable analysis using statistical software and prediction of future performance using the data. Observation situation is the key method that the teacher can use to obtain performance data to use in his analysis. The most used of such methods is the standardized direct observation that enables quantification of small samples of learning behaviors. Two of the challenges I expect to encounter are a large number of students and a group of students that have no learning objectives and goals but I have planned accordingly to counter those challenges. References Bray, M. A., & Kehle, T. J. (2011). The Oxford Handbook of School Psycholo. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Brookhart, S. M. (2010). Formative Assessment Strategies for Every Classroom: An ASCD Action Tool. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Frey, N., & Fisher, D. (2011). The Formative Assessment Action Plan: Practical Steps to More Successful. Alexandria, VA: ASCD. Millsap, R. E., & Olivares, A. M. (2009). The SAGE Handbook of Quantitative Methods in Psychology. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Sternberg, R. J., & Kaufman, S. B. (2011). The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Tuttle, H. G. (2010). Formative Assessment: Responding to your Students. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education. Read More