Prompt #9: Formative Assessments

What is your philosophy on assessment? 

In order to make sure we're doing our jobs properly (helping our students grow and learn), we can’t get away without conducting assessments. If we aren’t continually assessing our students’ understanding, we have no way of knowing if and how we may need to modify our instruction to meet our students’ needs. All the resources I’ve come across (I took a class called Intro to Assessment this summer) emphasize the importance of formative assessment over summative assessment. I can see why. Formative assessments include a range of formal and informal methods such as giving homework, in-class work, taking class surveys by show of hands, and simple asking questions of students to test their understanding of a topic in the moment. These little tests are essential to helping us gain insight and feedback from our students that inFORM our instruction. Diagnostic assessments are also important in the beginning. They help us establish a baseline of where our students are so we can strategize how to best carry out our instruction.

I don’t have a philosophy of assessment I can call my own yet, but that would be a start.

Some quick points:

• Frequently ask questions such as “Is there anything I’ve said which doesn’t make sense?”
• Frequently ask content questions to your students. Repetition, repetition, repetition! 
• Formative assessments shouldn’t be weighted as much into a final grade as summative assessments.
• Formative assessments are where the actual learning happens. They are interwoven into the art of teaching.
• As an art teacher, I'll have students create summative portfolios for each course. Other projects and exercises like idea sketching, sketchbook work, and materials tests will be formative assessments.

What are your impressions about the two formative assessment technologies (PearDeck&EduCanon) Scott shared?

I think PearDeck, aside from having a cute name, is a really cool interactive technology. It has obvious advantages as a presentation tool:

• Students submit their answers anonymously, getting rid of the stigma which comes from answering a question in front of the class.
• All students submit their answers to the teacher's questions, meaning the teacher instantly gets a snapshot of their entire class's understanding. 
• The interactivity of the device will help to keep students' attention. 

I wouldn't use this technology in my art classroom, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be useful to teachers of other subjects. 

EduCanon is another tool that teachers can use to gather and sort formative information about how their students are doing. Even though I can see it being incredibly useful in other subjects, it wouldn't make any sense to use this in the art classroom. When students are making a work of art or doing a drawing, their understanding of a concept is demonstrated by their performance (i.e., the creation a piece which incorporates the concepts we're learning about). Assessing art is a notoriously subjective task, and multiple-choice questions are far from ideal for assessing students' grasp of a particular artistic concept.