Drive Outcomes With Formative Assessment in the Classroom
Let’s start this blog post with a mock formative assessment. If I could have interviewed you before you clicked to read this article, I would have asked you to answer questions like, “What types of formative assessment do you use in the classroom?” or “How are you using formative assessment data to improve daily instruction?”
If I knew the answers to these and other important questions, I could write content that exactly matches your knowledge and needs. Fortunately, it’s much easier for you to collect data from formative assessment in the classroom and tailor instruction to your students than it is for me to tailor blog post content for any educator who finds it on the internet.
In this article, we’re exploring the goal of formative assessment in education and looking at ways you can use it to your advantage to drive student outcomes all year:
What is the goal of formative assessment?
Formative assessments help you evaluate how students learn while they’re learning. They occur naturally every day in the classroom through back-and-forth checks for understanding, quizzes, polls, discussion activities, and other types of assessments.
Thanks to immediate, real-time feedback, formative assessments let teachers adjust their strategies and lessons in the moment. They use the data to make their next instructional move based on what students know, what they’ve learned, and how they’re learning at a particular moment.
What are some challenges of collecting formative assessment data?
Formative assessments are powerful tools for gathering insights, spotting student learning trends, and improving instruction and outcomes collaboratively. You can see their impact when looking at data for individual students, a classroom, or the entire school or district.
But, problems arise when teachers use so many different types of formative assessments each day. They collect a lot of results but end up with data everywhere—on online platforms, on paper slips, in raised hands, and in verbal responses. Typically, there isn’t a single place to see all this data and easily pull insights.
This makes it difficult for teachers to track their students’ daily learning. They end up working alone and looking at isolated data instead of comparing insights across all types of formative assessments. Or, even worse, they’re collecting data but not using it at all.
For administrators, loose data makes it challenging to understand what the student body needs as a whole. Without consistent data, they can’t make informed district-level decisions about instructional strategies, resources, and teacher professional learning.
4 ways to leverage formative assessment classroom data
Your teachers already collect formative assessment data. To avoid challenges like disorganization and isolation, here are three ways to bring these insights together and use formative assessments to support data-driven instruction:
1. Define performance benchmarks
Data is most helpful when everyone using it measures it the same way against the same standards. Your district and state standards are a good guide but often broad. Educators can choose a variety of paths to meet them. That’s great for differentiation and meeting students where they are, but it’s not ideal for data collection and analysis.
Creating common formative assessments is a helpful way to set benchmarks. You administer common assessments the same way to all students in the same class, grade, school, or district. They work with any type of assessment: Formative, interim, or summative, because it’s not about the content or length. It’s about the delivery and data collection.
When you control how teachers give an assessment and grade the results, you can evaluate data consistently. This apples-to-apples comparison helps you find patterns in student results and use data in the most actionable and effective ways.
Formative by Newsela lets you administer effective common assessments and evaluate instruction district-wide. Admin controls let you create and consistently share common assessments while prioritizing data integrity. Common assessment performance reports and standards progress also help you pinpoint improvement or reteaching opportunities.
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2. Collect feedback for actionable data
Students don’t always tell their teachers what they need, and it’s not always easy for teachers to identify those needs in the moment. Real-time data from formative assessments helps them notice who needs additional support. It also highlights what knowledge gaps need to be filled and signals when students are ready to move forward.
The more in-the-moment feedback teachers can get from students, the more action they can take to tailor lessons to meet students' needs. Plus, administrators can use this data to look for trends across the school or district to provide more targeted support for students or professional development for teachers.
Formative helps all educators collect this feedback by providing daily insights at the student, class, school, and district levels. It provides teachers with data-rich, flexible question types that work with any content to capture learner insights. Once teachers can see how students are progressing toward a goal, they can differentiate instruction so everyone stays on track for learning.
3. Track performance and standards progress regularly
Frequent pulse checks are a powerful way to see if students are mastering state standards. They help teachers inform instruction across classrooms and help administrators guide and adjust strategies for educators each week.
These types of formative assessments provide more actionable data than interim and summative assessments alone. Results from interim and summative tests are often outdated by the time you see them, and they only inform future goals instead of real-time instruction.
With Formative, teachers no longer have to hope their students are ready for end-of-year assessments. They’ll have the data to prove it. Plus, admins can better anticipate the summative assessment results they’ll see later to plan throughout the year. With standards-aligned reporting, you can zoom in on teacher, classroom, building, or district performance to analyze trends. You can also tag and filter student responses by state standards to quickly identify performance gaps.
4. Share best practices and collaborate
Working in isolation to collect and analyze assessment data causes educators to miss out on peer support and district resources. When you equip departments and professional learning communities with a space to collaborate and share best practices, teachers are more likely to access the resources they need to do what they do best: Teach.
With Formative, teachers can collaborate on and share assessments and activities with anyone in their district. Departments can also manage libraries of premade formatives to support everyday instruction. This allows everyone to work together to push achievement across the district and meet the benchmarks you set.
Formative is your assessment tool to drive student outcomes
What’s the best way to make data work better for everyone? A platform for shared, real-time, actionable insights and collaboration. Your assessment tool should have the power to shape classroom learning, make it more accessible, and ensure every student achieves meaningful learning.
What could that look like for your teachers? How might it help you allocate resources across your district? You can see for yourself how Formative supports data-driven instruction to improve student outcomes.