Engaging Assessment Strategies
According to McManus (2008), teachers should consider these criteria when implementing effective formative assessment:
- Learning goals and criteria for mastery need to be clearly articulated to students.
- Students should be given feedback that is based in evidence from pieces of their learning. An example of this would be teacher responses to a student-facilitated discussion.
- Students should be self-assessing and interacting with their peers to reflect on their learning. Ultimately, they will be thinking metacognitively to monitor their growth. For example, students can provide each other with feedback on an essay they have written.
Using formative assessment to actively involve students in the learning process can help to build their motivation to learn, their communication skills, and their sense of respect and connection to the class. In this way learning becomes a social activity where students are actively involved in the learning process, which is one of the key elements contributing to academic achievement and creating lifelong learners. In a national study on high school student engagement, Yazzie-Mintz (2007) concluded that students want “to be actively involved in their learning, to be intellectually challenged, to be taken seriously as individuals, and to mean something within their high school communities” (p. 11).
Formative assessments can be used to engage students of any age. For instance, with beginning readers a teacher can read a paragraph and then use the formative assessment technique of random reporter to ask the students to recall what happened. In this way the teacher can engage the students in the story while assessing their ability to comprehend the passage. Using this and additional formative assessment techniques will also help students learn to self-assess and think metacognitively, so that they can monitor their comprehension.