Formative and Summative Assessments

            This week, we learned about assessments, both formative and summative. Personally, I believe assessments are very important. They have been demonized recently by media, parents, students, and teachers alike, but when done well, they are very effective learning tools and can measure learning in a way nothing else can.

I’ve heard of formative assessments, but never really knew what they are until today. This page gave a pretty good comparison between formative and summative assessments, but the gist is that formative are happening while the learning is taking place and measuring what is being learned, and summative are a final assessment at the end of a unit. Until now, I never realized that essentially anything you do in a classroom, whether it be a worksheet, a quiz, or a paper, is a formative assessment measuring student progress prior to the final, summative assessment (usually the final unit test, in my experience). Growing up sometimes I felt that the things I was doing in the classroom were kind of useless and not helping me, but now I realize how important those things were to both myself and my teachers, so they could see how I was doing.

This week’s topic video was done with Scott Kinkoph, and he used a few formative assessment tools that were pretty cool. One was PearDeck. It allowed him to ask students questions real time while he did his lecture, which was an awesome tool. He could give questions that were options A or B, Yes or No, numbers, or even open ended questions where the students would type a response and submit it. Using it, he could see the answers as they were coming in, and use them to influence the direction of his lecture. I think that’s a very useful tool, because the students can actively participate in what they’re learning. The other tool he used was EduCanon. I got to try it out on one of this week’s videos. It was a very useful tool. It asked you questions throughout the video, and then you can immediately find out if you got the answer correct or not. I loved that tool, because knowing there were questions coming that could quiz me and make sure I understood helped me pay attention to the video and make sure I was really absorbing it. Had I taken a quiz at the end instead of throughout the video, I think I would have done worse on it.

Personally, I believe the most striking thing about this presentation was just generally about formative assessments. The fact that they’re the best tool that we have as teachers to assess what our students are actually learning and are still struggling with is crucial. In the future, I hope I have more opportunities to measure my own learning and then my students learning using software such as the ones we used today or even good old fashioned paper and pencil assignments such as quizzes and worksheets.