Formative Assessment in Second Grade

Throughout your years in the classroom, you take many test, many you may think are pointless and are not helping you learn; but then there are those ones that enhance your learning and help you grow as a person. These types of tests are formative assessment. Assessments become formative when the teacher uses the information they receive and take it and adapt it to fit the needs of their students. As teachers to continue educating our students in the best way we can we must understand that there is a different between assessing FOR learning and the assessing OF learning.  Assessing for learning is formative assessment, whereas assessing of learning is summative assessment which is used to measure the level of success at the end of the unit; this is why formative assessment is necessary because it will help create a higher end result because the students will be learning more in all different ways.
There are many different varieties to formative assessment. One interesting idea is called Four Corners, in Four Corners, the students are given the opportunity to walk around the classroom, think by themselves, and also communicate with classmates. It is always a good idea to give the students many different ways to do an assessment, because all of our students learn differently. You can use Four Corners as a game to have students say if they "strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree" and also you can use it as an interactive way to do a multiple choice quiz together as a class and label the corners in your room "A, B, C, D." There are numerous ways to use formative assessment in your classroom and by taking all of these different assessment tools you will be able to reach all of your students; two different formative assessments could be a quiz or a journal and these two assessments both appeal to different types of students. The quiz appeals to the student that is good at test taking skills and a journal helps the student do individual reflection and this will help the student that is good at writing down their thoughts. By having so many different forms of formative assessment, no students will be left without learning.

Formative assessment is the way teachers should all be teaching. It may seem hard to think that you must have continuing testing throughout the day, but that is the only way to truly understand what your students are learning and all these small assessments throughout the day will better prepare you for understanding your class and better prepare your students as learners. It is said by Judith Dodge that "in the rush to cover more, students are actually learning less." Students tend to retain less when the information is not meaningful to them. It is important to continuing ask yourself throughout the day "How is my student evolving as a learner" and to use multiple forms of assessing to get your data because this will give you multiple windows to look at to see the types of ways your individual students learn best and to see how they are evolving as learners.  Some quick ways to gather information in your classroom to enhance learning are included in the Judith Dodge article and some of them are summaries and reflections which have the students stop and think about what they have just learned and be able to explain it, lists/charts/graphic organizers and these will help students note relationships that form between all the information they are processing, visual representations where the students will use both pictures and words to show relationships, and collaborative activities which will give the students the opportunity to talk to their peers and move around the classroom.

Using feedback from our students is necessary because after all having continuous dialouges with our students will help both the teacher and the students. It is important to teach through your students' eyes and just because the material my seem easy to you as a teacher, it does not mean all your students are grasping the information being presented to the them. Many of these things happen in a classroom daily, it is just our jobs as educators to make sure we walk around the classroom and listen to what our students are doing and making sure they are on the right task. It is also important in formative assessment to make sure we are not grading our students but giving them feedback and helping them further the information they know and helping them gain the information they do not know.