Assessment

One of my first trainings as a new teacher in the school district was about formative and summative assessment.  It was very useful because, my district uses a different grading system from the traditional model. My school district focuses on grading improvement rather than busy work, or practice. Formative assessment is practice of a standard, subject, or topic that has been taught, modeled, enriched, remediated, practiced, and even tested. We only count the three final grades of the end of unit summative assessment to grade a standard. For formative assessment, we use the independent practice, the homework, the exercises made in class. I can say that on a scale of 1-10 I am 8. I use exit tickets, I use whiteboards a lot for spelling, and math problems, I use thinking maps, thumbs up and down, I use homework, pretests, pair and share, etc. For summative assessment I use end of unit tests based on the homework, and classroom work, only when a standard has been dominated. This could happen in the form of a paper, project presentation, test, etc.  Assessment results help me reteach something that is not clear in class. Sometimes, kids forget vocabulary words. Sometimes, I reteach those concepts, when I see that they haven’t paired the correct word with the correct concept. Formative and summative assessment results are very useful for differentiating learning styles in students. Some are more visual, other listeners, other independent learners. I could say that I have incorporated, manipulatives, songs, smart board lessons, to reteach for students who didn’t get it the first time.