Formative+assessment

Formative assessment provide specific feedback to teachers and students for the purpose of guiding teaching to improve learning (Hongyan Li) Having known my students from they come from and some family, cultural and social backgrounds, I will pursue the next level diagnostic assessment or pre-assessment by finding out students’ prior knowledge. As an ESL teacher, I would like to have as accurate as possible information about every one of my students' language proficiency and learning abilities as well. It is very natural to me to apply the KWL technique to assess what my students’ prior knowledge or abilities on listening, reading, and speaking in English. The KWL chart will also build up the data base for the ongoing formative assessment. I will create a KWL charter for each student. The K-column will record students' prior knowledge by asking them some well defined questions to find out what they already know. I believe that I will get very good idea about my students’ English proficiency by a “three steps session” individually: 1) a 5-minute oral assessment by asking the student questions about their personal and family background; 2) a 5-minute read assessment by asking the students to read a short story to me; and 3) a 5-minute listen assessment by playing a short story to the student and then asking the student to tell me what this story is all about. I record the results in three levels: beginning, intermediate, and advanced.

The results from diagnostic assessment will give me a much better idea on the how to formulate the contents of my instructional plans that would be propitiate to my students, in terms of which skills my students need more practice to be good at, what knowledge my students need to gain so as to be moved in the regular academic class sooner. The W-column will record what my students want to learn and/or need to learn. The W-column will be derived from the results of pre-assessment showing in K-column in aligning with the standards for ESL students. As part of ongoing assessment or formative assessment, the L-column will record and constantly update what my students have learned at certain well defined set-points of my instructional plan. Lisa Almeida offered us some excellent practical strategies before, during, and after assessing English language learners (Reeves. 2007. p.157.),  · Use more visual than verbal;  · Ensure curriculum aligning with standards;  · Provide students more often opportunities to show their progress;  · Create student-friendly rubrics;  · Provide timely and specific feedback to students on their assessments;  · Work with students to set specific, measureable, achievable, relevant, and timely goals. In addition to my formative assessment, I think I will ask my student to conduct their own formative assessment as well. As what we have learned in this weeks reading material, “We must constantly remind ourselves that the ultimate purpose of evaluation is to have students learn to become self-evaluative…if students graduate from our schools dependent on others without an understanding of what is good, adequate, or excellent work, then we have failed them” (Costa and Kallick. 2004. p. 3). I will ask students to construct their own KWL chart. At the end of the instructional plan or semester, it would be very interesting to comparing my KWL chart with the students’ KWL chart. In summary, diagnostic assessment is essential in knowing our students and planning or adjusting instructional plan and formative assessment is critical in supporting students’ learning. However, this does not necessarily mean that we do not need summative assessment any more. To have the un-skewed assessment for each of our students by creating a photo album with the 100% sure right pictures in this photo album, we will need applying all three assessment techniques. I absolutely agree with Anne Davies (Reeves. 2007. pp. 35) that classroom assessment must be supported by four cornerstones. Formative assessment, feedback, motivation, and summative evaluation are the four cornerstones that provide the foundation for thoughtfully and deliberately involving students in the classroom assessment process.