ABSTRACT
An essential component of differentiation is consistent, formative assessment; you can’t have one without the other. Formative assessment refers to any activity that shows you what your students know, but is not for grading purposes—they are called “formative” since these revelations will “form” what you teach and how you teach it. To be honest, you can use any classroom task (or assessment) formatively since the term refers more to how you use assessment results than what assessments you use. For example, you could provide the unit-ending assessment on the first day, then teach the gaps that the students have. Students already know 40–50% of what we teach them, so by assessing students at the beginning of a unit, we do not waste time with too much reteaching (which can be boring, and is a waste of time in classrooms where time always seems to be in short supply) (Nuthall, 2007). The tools mentioned in this chapter are general and designed to highlight the multiple benefits of formative assessment:
It forces you to think about the essential skills that students need to acquire (and hopefully why those skills are meaningful or authentic).
It allows you to measure performance and progress with confidence.
It allows you to meet students slightly above their current level (a former professor called this “upping the ante”).
It makes students less afraid to fail (see the section on growth mindset) since they soon learn that formative assessments also assess teachers.
It allows you to differentiate like a surgeon, honing in on the specific skills your students are working on mastering (which is especially important for the middle grades since “older struggling readers are extremely heterogeneous and complex in their remediation needs”; Scammacca et al., 2007).
It makes learning goals explicit to students, so students know what they are learning and why.
It allows students to become aware of their current skills, and use this information to form self-directed learning goals (Black & Wiliam, 2005).
Students who receive frequent formative assessments rated their classes more favorably than those who did not receive these “educational gifts” by a large effect size (Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, & Kulik 1991).
