Page 78 - Resources and Support for the Online Educator

Leveraging Technology for Teacher Efficiency and Effectivenes • CHAPTER 11

Assessment

Effective teachers use assessment wisely to determine where students may be
struggling with a concept, plan for the next lesson, and help students self-assess
their progress. Often assessment is poorly understood, designed, and implemented.
I imagine lots of teachers, like me, never received any professional development
in assessment. Then, when I participated in a research project observing teachers’
assessment practices, I grew to appreciate how teachers and students can improve
learning when assessments are used well.
In my early teaching years, I used only summatives, which created a dilemma for
my students. They had one shot at guessing what I wanted them to parrot back
at me. Each summative was a “do or die” situation. Had I known about formative
assessments, I could have differentiated my instruction so much better. I would
have known who was already on target and who needed support. Instead, I some-
times didn’t know what students misunderstood until they all missed the same
questions on the summatives.

So, here is a brief summary of formative assessment and some tools. Formative
assessment checks for student understanding in the midst of learning. The
assessments are not graded, but rather are intended to pinpoint where individual
students are struggling with the content. The assessment data has to be analyzed,
sometimes in the moment, and then acted on. The goal of clickers has always been
to enable teachers to assess for understanding. When teachers collected data with
clickers and then continued on without adjusting their teaching to respond to the
data, researchers found some students started responding erratically. Don’t collect
data if you don’t plan to use it to guide instruction.

A teacher recently told me she’d like to use a digital formative assessment tool
but didn’t know what data to collect or what to do with the data. While I was
observing in a classroom recently, I watched a teacher review figurative language
terms a couple of days prior to the scheduled summative. The teacher used Kahoot!
(kahoot.com), which is great fun for students. I observed several things. First, I
observed that some students watched the one boy who was noted to be the best
student in the class and always chose the same answer he chose. That skewed the
data. Then when the review ended, the teacher told students to write down any
answer they got wrong. She depended on them to remember what they hadn’t
known. Finally, she told them to study the terms if they had missed any.

Integrating Technology in the Classroom 267

Integrating Technology in the Classroom: Tools to Meet the Needs of Every Student 78