What Teachers Really Need to Know About Formative Assessment, June/2010

If you’ve always thought that formative assessment was complicated and confusing—and too much to add to what you already do—here’s a book that explains exactly how to make formative assessment a seamless and natural part of your teaching process. Emphasizing applications at the secondary level but relevant to all grade levels and every discipline, this “teacher’s eye” view of formative assessment explains how it benefits you and your students and provides lots of assessment strategies you can use before, during, and after instruction to improve your instruction and your students’ learning, including

• ? Four ways to assess students’ prior knowledge, skills, values, and readiness for the purpose of fine-tuning your unit plans.
  ? Seven tools and strategies to use to monitor understanding, including voting cards, Fingers-Up, Line-Up, and graphic organizers.
  ? Ways to help ensure unit mastery by using Nutshelling, 3–2–1, Ball Toss, Q&A Mix-Up, and Grab Bag.
  ? Strategies for peer and self-assessment including journaling, critiques, and rubrics.

To help you start using these strategies right away, there are dozens of examples of classroom practice, prompts to help you connect these examples to your own lesson plans, and case studies to deepen your understanding. You’ll also find sample templates to help you organize and track your assessment data and use it to improve the learning of all your students.