Claim – Evidence – Reasoning

Kenneth Plont

Social Studies

11/14/18

4. Formative Assessment

Students in my eighth grade classes have been doing a unit on the Articles of

Confederation for the past few weeks. Throughout this unit, I have understood better, as an

educator, how to implement and utilize formative assessments in my classroom to check for

genuine student understanding of the Articles of Confederation content. Throughout this

trimester, I have neglected to give at least two quizzes or formative assessments throughout a

unit prior to the unit test, and this time around, I planned for two quizzes and students seemed to

score significantly better on the test once that was taken.

My claim is that I have improved in the last year since beginning student teaching in fall

2017 at utilizing and implementing formative assessments in the classroom and seeing how that

ultimately has an effect on test scores across the classes that I’m teaching.

The evidence is that students scored averages of 83% in 3rd period, 82% in sixth period ,

68% in 8th period, their previous assessment over their declaration of independence unit. On

their single quizzes over the French and Indian War, the classes average about 70% among all

three classes. Their quiz scores on “British policy” averaged about 58% to 69% in one class. This

demonstrated to me that kids needed more focused and frequent formative assessments to check

for understanding and to provide feedback to each individual student on their progress and

learning. Furthermore, it provides me with feedback on different instructional techniques that

could be implemented to increase and improve these scores when the unit test or summative

assessment rolls around for the eighth graders. On this second quiz over the Articles of

Confederation the class averages were: 92% in third period, 92% in sixth period, 100% in 8th

period. For the first quiz over the articles of confederation, students scored an average of 75% in

third period, 77% in sixth period and 65% in eighth period. For the second formative assessment,

scores went up nearly 15% in two of the classes and roughly 35% in the last class! To me, this

proves that the more formative assessments that are given, the better the students do and the

better feedback I can provide for them. Prior, the students were only exposed to test-like

questions through rote memorization review games, but through the quizzes and writing “do

nows” that they did everyday this week.”

Therefore, this demonstrates that utilizing formative assessments in the classroom is

beneficial to student performance on the unit test and their overall understanding of the concepts,

facts and information that they’re learning everyday in the classroom. Overall, since last year,

I’ve learned how to effectively and efficiently implement formative assessments and use them to

gauge student understand. Beyond that, I’ve grown in the sense that I understand how to provide

adequate feedback to students in order to ensure a more enduring understanding of content and

how to adjust my instruction. Utilizing formative assessments more effectively has also lead to

improved lesson progression and design. Since I’ve gained a clearer understanding on how to use

formative assessments in the classroom, I’ve been able to more cohesively design the

progression of a unit and where formative assessments fit into that unit design. This is crucial for

effective teaching now and in the future.