School districts are striving to improve test scores to retain students. Students are the future citizens of our community, and every community is trying to have educated people to run the city. Long are the days of having students complete a multiple-choice test that assesses comprehension, recall, and one evaluation question. Students are having to think outside of the box, problem-solve, and answer questions where they have to demonstrate their knowledge. After meeting with the teacher leader, I thought about how students are demonstrating the skills for the state standards. Does a multiple-choice question actually allow me to collect enough information about what a student knows? As a teacher, I answered no. I began using formative assessments such as exit slips and the nine high-yielding Marzano strategies to check for understanding from my students.
Where to Start
I design my lessons by looking at the unit’s pacing guide. I think about the overall standard my students have to learn by the end of the unit. Using the pacing guide, I create a calendar of skills I want my students to learn. Next, I look at the state or the common core standards and align the standards to the pacing guide. I think of formative assessments I want to give per standard. My exit slip contents are writing prompts or pose questions.
Exit slips can be challenging and thought-provoking because they involve the lesson and what information students have learned. When planning the lesson, I typically use two types of formative assessments to check for understanding. I use Marzano’s “Identifying similarities and differences” and “Summarizing” to assess students. I limit assessing students using traditional multiple-choice tests (except for final exams) because I want to know my students’ thinking and ability to grasp concepts. I can reteach a lesson or scaffold to the next assignment. Sometimes students have to write a paragraph, answer a question, or complete a graphic organizer. These types of assessments give me a snapshot of what the students know in the lesson.
Formative Assessment Ideas After Every Lesson
1)Recently, I taught my senior students about mood and tone. After the students watched a teacher leader video, I further discussed the topics. I reviewed the steps the teacher used to help identify the mood and tone, such as word choice and diction to evoke feelings. Students were given time to ask questions before working in breakout rooms (on Zoom) to demonstrate their ability to identify mood and tone within pieces of poetry.
2) I designed a worksheet with the learning target on the top of the page. I read the target to provide direction and the expectation of the lesson. The worksheet had a t-chart that compared and contrasted the vocabulary of mood and tone. This strategy is quite difficult when you are addressing high-structure tasks because students have to think about the definition of the items, how are they similar, and how they are different.
Last year, I created a comparison matrix for my middle school students, which is a similarities/differences chart, and my students struggled to identify the correct answers to fill out the matrix. Even while working in cooperative groups, my students found it challenging to complete a comparison matrix.
3) Students summarize passages to show understanding. This strategy includes reading a passage and identifying the critical information from it. Students must think of what information to keep and what to leave behind. I use this strategy with my career exploration classes when introducing an article on an important topic, such as resume writing. I instruct them to write a summary with a word count, and they always meet the learning target.
4)On exit slips, I may have students write one to two sentences identifying the critical information of the lesson. For larger projects, they must write a paragraph where they have to identify critical information.
The Value of Summarizing
Teaching students to summarize and how to take notes will benefit students throughout their educational careers and across all curricula. According to Classroom Instruction that Works by Robert J. Marzano, et., “They [summarizing and note taking] provide students with tools for identifying and understanding the most important aspects of what they are learning,” (48). As a teacher that is what I am assessing. Can students identify and show an understanding of the content that was taught? This allows me to have a better picture of a student’s thinking versus a multiple-choice test.
For many years of my teaching career, I used multiple-choice tests. It was our curriculum and used with our textbooks. Students could show that they can guess the correct answer; there was no explanation or application of their thought process. I remember in school, I had countless vocabulary tests, and I always did well on them. I learned a valuable lesson while I was in college and I took a test that had vocabulary words where I had to apply the meaning. For example, the word was onomatopoeia. I remembered the definition, but I had never used the word when describing poetry or verbal language. On a test, I was looking for the definition, not the usage. That is one example of knowing the definition and not the application of a word. I learned from that experience. When I taught 8th grade ELA, I created a packet of poems using figurative language. I went step by step and taught how to identify figurative language within the poems. I taught the vocabulary and the application of the word. I could have assessed the students by having them summarize their thoughts of figurative language or create categories for the literary terms.
Changing The Teacher’s Mind
Assessing students involves more than just circling a letter on a sheet of paper. Are they thinking through the steps to solving a problem? Can they restate the lesson’s learning target in the correct manner? Did they identify or explain the lesson’s goal? Are they using their inferencing skills to solve the problem? Using meaningful formative assessments produce better results. You can make exit slips rigorous or simple. I believe in more rigorous exit slips. While teaching seniors, I posed the question, “What human characteristic does Plath attribute to the mushrooms? What effect does her use of personification have on the reader’s understanding of mushrooms?” (Springboard, 28) I learned that students did not understand personification, and they had trouble identifying it within the poem. This led to a short mini-lesson on the topic of personification. Their writing samples alerted me that they were struggling with the question. On a multiple-choice question, I would not have learned the thinking behind getting the answer correct.
As teachers within the 21st century, our old ways of assessing students are archaic. We need a snapshot of our students’ thinking and learning. Are students learning and mastering grade-appropriate standards? How will teachers know without seeing their thoughts written on paper? During every lesson, students have to write. Formative assessments can be an exit slip, a short summary, or a graphic organizer. I am assessing understanding and if the lesson learning targets were accomplished. If students do not achieve the learning target, then I teach a mini-lesson. However, most students meet the learning target because it is stated several times, and it’s modeled for them before they move to perform the skill independently. It’s a confidence booster for my students, and it’s a proud moment for me.
Let me know in the comment section below if you have moved from multiple-choice tests to formative assessments that take snapshots that demonstrate how a student thinks and learns.
Work Cited
Marzano, Robert J, Debra Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. Alexandria, Va: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2001.
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