A few strands of my work have come together recently, and they focus on using technology to support formative assessment. This has been one of the most common requests recently from teachers/schools I’ve been working with and is the focus of two additional projects I’ve been working on. (You can skip directly to the tools here. Updated with two new tools on March 2.)
Through my work with the Appalachia Regional Comprehensive Center (ARCC), I’m collaborating with staff from the Virginia Department of Education to pilot a statewide cadre of teachers exploring formative assessment. Teachers from six schools across the state are working through training materials developed by Dr. Margaret Heritage and the Center for Standards and Assessment Implementation (formerly the Assessment and Accountability Center).
Formative Assessment by Margaret Heritage
Dr. Heritage is probably the nation’s foremost expert on formative assessment and has been implementing and studying formative assessment strategies in multiple districts for years. (Check out her book on the topic!)
What Dr. Heritage does is provide concrete steps teachers can follow to embed formative assessment in their teaching. I agree with Heritage when she notes that formative assessment is not a single “thing” or event. It’s not a quiz. It’s not a test. It’s an ongoing dialog between teachers and students that ids designed to collect evidence of where students are in their journey of mastering skills and knowledge.
From my perspective, I overlay this idea of formative assessment being a process to the selection of relevant technology resources. An online quiz or a classroom responder (clicker) is itself not a formative assessment tool, unless used that way. For that reason, I’ve grouped a range of digital resources that can be used formatively, but you have to first identify the way you want to use it. That’s the trick to picking any technology for classroom use, actually. Figure out what you need to accomplish, then find a resource to match.
This is not an exhaustive list, and it was just updated this past week after my visit to Dubuque where I learned Infused Learning is on the way out and GoFormative.com is a new resource to be considered. I’d appreciate hearing from you about the digital resources you use and how you use them to support formative assessment so I can update this over time.