Formative Assessment and Recursive Feedback

Formative Assessments are quick checks during the learning process. These traditionally have served the purpose of giving a teacher a snapshot of where the student’s grasp of a topic is in its development to inform the teacher’s further lessons. However, current thought suggests that the role of formative assessment should be expanded from that narrow didactic approach to teaching to one of affording the student recursive feedback to help with future progress. These two roles are compatible. The teacher mines data from the formative assessment and is then able to use that data to craft better lessons, as well as give the student feedback on where he or she needs to improve his or her work in order to earn the grade desired.

Traditionally, this type of assessment and the giving of recursive feedback would be difficult for a teacher to do continually with an entire class. There is just not enough time, so summative testing was used in which the students take a test at the end of a unit of study and the test questions and process are largely cognition process dealing with memory. “Such tests are peculiar artifacts and processes, quite different from the other artifacts and

processes of learning, inside and outside of school” (Cope & Kalantzis 2017). Summative tests are merely a snapshot of what a student remembered in a moment of time, and exercise in recall rather than the production of learning that demonstrates the student’s ability to use and create new understanding of a concept.

However, the development of new technologies has aided in providing more immediate feedback (Dodge). Initially, programs that gave students diagnostic test and scored them quickly as well as ones that had students reading and answering questions on a passage which could adapt to the learning level of the students were among the advancements that provided teachers with an easy means of giving formative assessments. The self- scoring features of these programs afford the student more immediate and recursive feedback from the teacher. The addition of group work, peer assessment, and self-assessment now make the application of formative assessment and recursive feedback also improve the process of formative assessment and recursive feedback. This type of formative assessment encourages learning and does not penalized lapses in memory the way a summative assessment at the end of a unit might. It encourages students to be knowledge producers through timely feedback throughout the learning process that supports the student. Current teaching theories suggest that this is much more in tune with how we access and use information and effective in building life- long learners in the long run than summative assessments.

References

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2017). Conceptualizing e-Learning. In B. Cope, & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), e-Learning Ecologies: Principles for New Learning and Assessment (pp. 1-45). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315639215-1

Dodge, Judith. “25 Quick Formative Assessments for a differentiated Classroom. Scholastic. https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/what-are-formative-assessments-and-why-should-we-use-them/