Two Quick Formative Assessment Strategies

Are you exhausted from your end-of-semester responsibilities? Here are two quick and fun formative assessment strategies (3.5, 6.3)  that you can incorporate tomorrow in your classroom.

Back-to-back and face-to-face

Partners stand back-to-back and wait for a question or prompt.  After listening to the prompt and being given time to think about the response, students face one another and take turns responding. For formative assessment purposes, the teacher can cold-call on one team to respond, and then ask everyone who had the same response to raise their hands.  The teacher can then call on those with different responses to share, and would have a clear picture of the level of understanding and the diversity of thought.

To add interest, this could be done with an inner circle and outer circle. The inner circle could rotate, so students would have a new partner for each prompt.

RSQC2

Give each student a 3 x 5 card.  Allow two minutes for them to students recall and list in rank order the most important ideas from today’s lesson (or they could write evidence of reaching the learning target); in three more minutes, ask them to summarize those points in a single sentence, write one major question they want answered, make a comment about their level of understanding, and make a connection to either the unit or course goals or to an analogy outside the course.  The teacher now has information on those students who may need more help with the learning target and which questions they need to have answered.