The Purpose of Formative Assessments

Making Assessment Fun!

In the spring semester, I run a Literacy Clinic at SUNY Old Westbury, where students who are in grades K-12 come to campus and the students in the Literacy Graduate Program plan literacy instruction for the K-12 students. This semester, one of the assignments that the literacy students had to complete was an assessment overview for the students they are teaching. This required them to administer around three reading and writing assessments and then analyze the assessments to find the students’ reading and writing strengths and identify areas that need further support.

This past week I read the assessment papers and I was impressed with how holistically the literacy students are looking at the assessments that they are administering. They are analyzing each assessment, but then looking across the assessments to see if the strengths are the same and if the skills that need more support are matching up in each assessment. This holistic view allows the literacy students to see the skills that need to be targeted for the students they are working with this semester and then plan lessons that will target the needs.

One literacy student, for example, is working with a child who is learning to identify the letters of the alphabet. The child can identify all of the letters when they are written as capital letters, but the child is not able to identify all of the lowercase letters. The literacy student administered a phonics assessment as well to learn what letter sounds the child knows. From both assessments, the literacy student learned which letters and sounds need to be explicitly taught and she put together a plan to get the child reading words as the letters and sounds were being taught. She is trying to see if the child will learn the letters and sounds better and faster if they are immediately connected to words that the child can read.

Rather than guessing, the literacy student was able to administer assessments, learn about the what the child knows and what the child needs to learn, and then plan instruction that meets the child’s needs. That’s the point of formative assessments – they inform our teaching. As teachers, we want to support our students with skills that they need to learn in order to be stronger readers and writers, and in order to do that, we need to administer and analyze assessments that will provide accurate information about the child. And, when you have multiple assessments that provide similar information – it’s all the better!