Formative Assessments
InTASC Standard 6: The teacher understands and uses multiple methods of assessment to engage learners in their own growth, to monitor learner progress, and to guide the teacher’s and learner’s decision making.
As I go through the year, I plan my lessons based on the objectives that I set for my students through formative assessments, such as exit tickets, vocabulary quizzes, and written and speaking check-ins. As I learned in Effective Practices in Teaching and Learning (2010), "It is important to use more than one strategy to elicit evidence of how well students are meeting the success criteria. Not only will a number of different strategies provide [me] with multiple ways to check on learning, but they will also give students the opportunity to show what they understand or can do in a variety of forms" (Heritage, 2010). The assessments also motivate students to study their flashcards and do their homework (for vocabulary quizzes) and pay attention and participate in each day's material (for exit tickets and written/speaking check-ins), as they witness the results of their labor. The more effort they put into learning the language, the more confident they will become and the easier the assessments will be for them. The students then connect better study habits and better assessment scores with stronger use of the language outside of the classroom in a practical manner. This is something that I continue to build upon, by varying and improving the methods that I use to assess students' abilities. This gives me a more accurate picture of what my students know and where they need to improve.
Table of Contents
Exit Tickets
At the end of most lessons, I task students with an exit ticket that varies from multiple-choice questions to an open paragraph question. However, in each instance, the students respond to a prompt that is relevant to the day's topic. I align the exit tickets to each lesson's objective before planning my instructional strategies. This provides me direction and makes sure each of my activities are scaffolded and linearly-aligned to my lesson objectives. It then makes it clearer for me to connect these lesson objectives to greater unit goals. On top of that, I am able to assess not only my students' grasp of the lesson's material but my effectiveness in presenting it. Upon doing this, I can find which strategies and activities were effective and which were not. I can also determine what material needs more practice and what material my students have mastered. As I learned in Effective Practices in Teaching and Learning (2010),"The whole point of the formative assessment evidence is to check student learning to make sure it is on the right track to meet the success criteria and the learning goal, and if it isn’t, to make adjustments to teaching and learning. Alignment is paramount for this" (Heritage, 2010). When my exit tickets all come back with few errors, I know that the students are ready to move to new or more challenging material. On the other hand, if many students make errors, I can check for similarities and target those specific misunderstandings in the next lesson.
Here are a few examples of exit ticket prompts. They vary depending on the lesson. The example on the left with the highlighted words is multiple choice, where the students need to choose the correct word to complete the sentence accurately based on words we learned that day. It states: 1. Ana es a woman/man/house/apartment. 2. Lola is/lives/has in an apartment. 3. Pablo is/car/lives/likes Lola. 4.Sam strong/letter/speaks English. The second exit ticket asks the questions: 1. Where are you from? 2. How old are you? 3. Where do you live? We learned these questions that lesson, and the students needed to be able to answer in Spanish. The third exit ticket is an open-ended response based on target vocabulary that we had been learning that week. The last exit ticket is one that I employ every once in awhile to get student feedback and see if the material is interesting to them. Here are samples of each below:
In this exit ticket (photo above), my students were tasked with choosing the correct answer based off the day's lesson and target language which fit in the larger context of the unit. This unit's objective includes having students understand and apply important Spanish phrases that are used in small talk and daily conversations, such as "gustar" (to like), "hablar" (to speak), and "vivir" (to live). In this specific class, most students scored a 3 or 4 (out of 4). This — along with a number of scaffolded activities involving speaking, listening, reading and writing — gives me a general idea of my students' understanding of the material. A few students made errors involving "vivir" and "gustar," which I addressed in the following lesson. If more students were to make many more errors, I would then tailor my instruction in the following lesson to address their misunderstandings and include different instructional strategies to best ensure student understanding.
In this exit ticket (photo above), the student wrote five, full sentences about herself using words and structures that we learned in class. Her writing states, "I like to sleep. I am from New York. My name in (blurred name). I am 14 years old. I am going to sleep this weekend." These are all words that we had recently learned in class, and I use exit tickets like this one to motivate students. They see how much more they are able to write each month and become excited by their progress throughout the year.
The exit ticket above asks the students three beginning level questions:
1. Where are you from? 2. How old are you? 3. Where do you live? Both of the students in the example responded in full sentences; however, the student on top made an error that I noticed in many students' work. Instead of using "Yo" as "I" in Spanish, he used "Mi" which means "My. In the next lesson, we participated in a Do Now and a mini whiteboard activity, where I addressed this common error. His error is an example of how I use exit tickets to address common errors.
In this exit ticket (photo above), the students wrote 3 new or interesting things that they learned over two class periods. We learned useful phrases in Spanish and had a lesson on the different Spanish-speaking countries. This exit ticket was used to see what during class stuck out to the students. I regularly like to see what aspects of class the students find interesting, so that I can continue to plan engaging lessons for the students.
Vocabulary Quizzes
A key part of learning a foreign language is knowing the lexicon. This is unavoidable, since if students do not know the target vocabulary, they are very limited in what they can do in the target language. This is why I put a heavy emphasis on learning the vocabulary as part of homework and the beginning part of the lesson. It is in a way a flipped classroom model, where students learn and memorize the vocabulary at home and in the first part of each class, and then they spend the remainder of class applying it in a productive manner. Vocabulary quizzes are short and frequent assessments that hold students accountable to learning the vocabulary. I employ a few strategies in ensuring the students learn the target lexicon. These include students using flashcards that I created at the beginning of class and completing a homework assignment that involves studying the vocabulary for a certain amount of time each week. Without vocabulary quizzes, I noticed my students would not take the time in class and at home to study seriously. As a result, I hold frequent vocabulary quizzes that take no more than 10 minutes to complete but hold enough clout in terms of grading that the students take the vocabulary much more seriously. They then see how many words they learned when we look back at all the different flashcard sets we covered, and I see many of them express pride as a result.
In this example, I have three student samples from a vocabulary quiz on clothing. The two quizzes on the left show the quiz without modifications. The matching quiz on the right is a modified version that I made for a few of my students with IEPs (Individualized Educational Programs). The students studied flashcards containing these exact words and completed homework, where they further practiced them. After the quiz, I had the students switch papers and correct their peers' quizzes, so that they can see all the correct answers and therefore, further consolidate the target vocabulary. Grading by peer not only saves me time, but it helps the students who answered incorrectly. It works as additional practice, giving students another chance to review the target vocabulary.
I give weekly homework assignments, where students spend 15-30 each week studying the vocabulary words. I am able to monitor if they completed the assignment, and it is difficult for students to cheat on this assignment. I also create flashcards that the students review at the beginning of most classes.
This image shows Gimkit, the platform that I use for homework and vocabulary practice. I assign a homework assignment each week that the students complete by playing a flashcard game. Students regularly mention to me that they enjoy the homework assignment and see improvements in the number of words that they can recall.
This image shows a few sets of flashcards that I created for students to practice vocabulary at the beginning of the class. My vocabulary quizzes are based directly off the homework and flashcards.
This image also shows Gimkit. It contains the data of each class/student's homework progress. I am able to see who completed each assignment and how well they performed. As seen above, this class had a 63% completion rate for the week. This is less than ideal. Each class I remind students the importance of completing their homework and how it will help them not only on the assessments but outside of class when they interact with native speakers.
This image shows one of my classes reviewing the target vocabulary with our flashcards. The students spend a few minutes during the beginning of class reviewing the vocabulary, so that they can apply it throughout the rest of the lesson. It is also beneficial, as it scaffolds the target language. The students are much more likely to recall the words during class if they see them at the beginning of class.
Speaking Check-ins
In addition to written check-ins, I have students practice their speaking abilities in every class. This gives me many opportunities to assess their progress and address common misunderstandings and mispronunciations. Because my speaking activities generally require students to read a prompt, work with a partner in the target language, and then write their response, students practice their speaking, listening, reading and writing abilities in these activities. Speaking is incredibly important in learning a language, as it is one of the more-utilized skills. If one were to travel to a Spanish-speaking country, he/she would need to be able to communicate with those around him/her. Since I teach Spanish 1 and 2, my goal for my students is to reach an Intermediate level of speaking. As defined by the ACTFL Standards, "speakers at the Intermediate level are distinguished primarily by their ability to create with the language when talking about familiar topics related to their daily life. They are able to recombine learned material in order to express personal meaning. Intermediate-level speakers can ask simple questions and can handle a straightforward survival situation. They produce sentence-level language, ranging from discrete sentences to strings of sentences, typically in present time. Intermediate-level speakers are understood by interlocutors who are accustomed to dealing with non-native learners of the language" (ACTFL, n.d.). In order to reach this level, I include speaking activities in every class. To keep track of progress and motivate students, I regularly assess their ability to communicate under a certain topic.
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In the photo, a few of my students are performing a skit, where they use school-based and introductory vocabulary to show a "new" student our school. I use the speaking rubric (above) to score students based on their performance on speaking tasks. The students are graded on their pronunciation, pace/fluency, vocabulary, and grammar. In this instance, the students' pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary were good, but they depended too much on the script, so I took a point off under pace/fluency.
Written Check-ins
I do many activities to apply and assess the students' written abilities. One of the activities that I employ on almost a daily basis is the use of mini white boards. I have students grab a white board and perform a variety of tasks. These tasks can include listening practice, responding to prompts on the projector, or translating. When students complete each task, they then raise the board for me to give instant feedback. If their response is correct, I give them a quick thumbs up or "yes." If it is incorrect, I give quick feedback. If I notice common errors, I go over them on the projector as a whole class. "[As] formative assessment is a process that takes place continuously during the course of teaching and learning to provide teachers and students with feedback to close the gap between current learning and desired goals" (Heritage, 2010), the instant feedback provided during white board activities ensures that I prevent misunderstandings from persisting until summative assessments.
In the photo, My students are working on a mini whiteboard activity.
I use the whiteboards, markers, and erasers in the photo above to conduct mini whiteboard activities.
When the students answer a question, they hold up the whiteboard for quick, instant feedback (photo above). When I see similar mistakes arise, I address it whole group.
I address the common errors on the front whiteboard by eliciting the answer from the students in contrast to simply telling them the answer. This way the material is more likely to stay in students' memories, as they are active participants in their learning. The photo above shows the question "Dónde está _____?" (which means "Where is _______?") and photos of a church and the singer Beyonce. The students are learning about locations, so they have to produce sentences describing where people are/go and what they do there.
References:
ACTFL. (n.d.). ACTFL Speaking Guidelines. Retrieved October 2, 2019, from https://www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/actfl-proficiency-guidelines-2012/english/speaking.
Heritage, M. (2010). Formative assessment: Making it happen in the classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2012). Preparation for assessment. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Teach For America. (2011). Instructional planning & delivery. Retrieved from http://www.teachingasleadership.org/sites/default/files/Related-Readings/IPD_2011.pdf