Our objective in this task is developing a general framework on formative assessment that we can use for our final reflection.
We expect participants to work in groups of three people and provide their own views on how assessment can change and become much richer if we consider each of the following:
Create your groups.
Think of assessment activities that address 2 different agents, skills, strategies and tools.
Explain them briefly below.
If you are addressing a strategy or using a tool that is missing from this list, simply add it!
Some examples have been provided.
Group formation.
Add your name to one of the groups
GROUP 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
Group 5
Group 6
1-Lluís Miquel Bennàssar
Marisa
Glòria
2-
3-
Framework for Formative Assessment based on competence
A task can be assessed by different agents:
The teacher
The student
The group
Another student
In a task we can assess:
The four skills
Reading
Speaking
Writing
Listening
Integrated skills
Soft Skills
ICT
Multicultural awareness
Learning to Learn skills
(Different 2.0 tools are implied in this, but this course is not focused in them, so we are not looking at them in this way here.)
For what purpose:
Accreditation - Assessment of learning
Formative assessment - Process approach focused on individual learners - Assessment for learning
An activity that springs to my mind is very similar to Nuria's. Students write a paragraph about their partner after a get to know activity. I collect the paragraphs and point out a single mistake from each paragraph for students to correct in groups. In the next class students try to work out the mistakes in groups. Then each student in the group explains why the sentence is wrong and how it should be corrected. For homework students upload their corrections and explanations on the class wiki. Assessment: students get a gold star for the oral presentation and another gold star for uploading the correction on the class wiki. The oral presentations also allow to give students feedback on pronunciation.
It addresses the four skills Assessment is based on participation To reflect on language To foster participation To foster language accuracy
GROUP 1
Creating mind maps can be a very good activity as well. Students get marks or gold stars for creating mind maps for vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, spelling. Mind maps can help visual learners. Assessment can be based on producing mind maps and incorporating them into the Portfolio.
GROUP 1
Redrafting is another tool for formative assessment which I already use. Here is an example that can be modified and tailored to suit other needs:
1. Students finish a draft of their text and exchange them to get
feedback from their peers.
2. The teacher collects in the students’ texts and indicates where there
are problems.
3. In pairs or small groups students help each other to make sense of
the corrections that the teacher has pointed out in their written work.
4. The teacher monitors and helps the pairs and groups, clarifying
anything that is unclear in the marking.
5. Students write the next draft of their text incorporating the feedback.
Assessment is based on getting gold stars for solving the problems and incorporating the feedback.
GROUP 1
This activity can be given different titles, such as “The Start of my life” or “Getting to know you”.
The aim of the activity is to introduce yourself (as a teacher) to the class students as well as getting some information about them; it is a perfect ice-breaker for the first day of class.
This activity can be applied to all levels, as far as we as teachers are aware of the type of questions they are able to produce.
The only material we need is a Power Point slide showing a picture of us (if possible) and 5 or 6 words which are related to us. The students have to guess the meaning the words have in our lives asking questions. Then you can extend the activity making them write on a piece of paper 3 or 4 words related to them and the rest of the class have to guess what they mean for them.
Depending on the course level I would put more difficult or easier words to guess so that they have to produce easier or more complex questions. That is to say, I would guide them to produce simple common questions in 1st E.S.O, such as “Where are you from?” whereas I would guide them to questions such as “Have you ever been to...?” in 4th E.S.O.
I think this is a very engaging activity because students usually are willing to know information about their teachers. The only two problems we can face are on the one hand the loss of interest in the activity if they know each other well because then the guessing game is non-sense. On the other hand it can be difficult for low level students to produce a grammatically correct question, making some students tongue-tied and unable to speak.
We can try to avoid these problems using this activity only when we are sure they do not know each other (1st E.S.O) and also pre-teaching them the structure of the questions.
We can also group them in mixed-ability groups so that they can help each other building the questions.
A formative assessment activity can be trying to remember the information, trying to remember the questions. In order to do this the teacher could adapt the checklist of items to include in a learning diary to include specific activities like this, e.g., sts have to include some evidence of the activity “Getting to know you” in the diary entry.
GROUP 1
This activity is called “Putting yourself in someone’s shoes”. It encourages our students to give their opinion about a topic and at the same time it makes them think about their social environment and be aware of the differences and similarities among cultures, beliefs, etc.
This activity can be used at any level, always bearing in mind their knowledge and to what extent they are able to produce or to describe a person, and so on. Therefore the first activity I would do is to run a brainstorming session in order to think of as many adjectives as possible, which can be understood as a warm-up activity.
Before I present the activity itself to the students, I would ask them some questions related to the topic we are going to speak on, such as if they judge a person just by looking at the clothes he or she wears; if the clothes we wear tell a lot about ourselves and things like that.
Then I would put them together into groups of 3 or 4 and would give them a picture where they can only see someone’s shoes. The first thing they have to do is to describe the shoes they have in their picture. Then I would make them hypothesise about the type of person who could wear the shoes, if he or she is young or old, what kind of job he or she does... and so on.
Then I would give them the complete picture so that they can check if their guesses were right or wrong and make a complete description of the picture.
As a follow-up activity we can expand the topic and work on stereotypes, how we tend to classify people and to what extent the stereotypes are right or wrong.
We can also work on urban tribes, which I think would be a really appealing topic for them and one which would make them engage in the activity.
I think that this is a very attractive activity for our students and I do not think it can have many problems. The only limitations students can find is the lack of vocabulary to make the descriptions, but it can be solved by pre-teaching the vocabulary and running a brainstorming session at the beginning of the lesson, which would brush up their previous knowledge.
The assessment could be a project on urban tribes. In groups they create a poster showing various urban tribes. The focus of the activity is on content rather than accuracy. They get gold stars. I think a project like this could account for 10% of the mark. And again, the next way to assess it, it should be reflected appropriately in the corresponding diary entry.
Other formative assessment I can think of is creating a mind map with the adjectives used to describe people, their clothes, shoes, etc. A language spot on the order of adjectives plus a correction spot students have to do in groups based on the mistakes I have collected after revising the captions for their project (very similar to Núria's approach in the Kung Fu Panda activity, i.e., I try to get students to correct errors that I think are accessible to understand). Or even get students to do a quiz based on the project on urban tribes.
In this activity, the children are given a set of pictures which are in the wrong order (A recipe: How to make a sandwich). The teacher describes the pictures in the correct order and the children have to identify them in sequence. They may not understand everything hear. That is quite deliberate. We are encouraging them to use their ability to work on partial information and to take risks. It is easier for them to do both these things with listening than speaking, because they are being asked to respond not to produce the language themselves.
Possible follow up: Students can write the recipe, they might like to devise their own suprise sandwich. They can take the basic pattern of instructions from the board but choose their own ingredients. Let them use their imaginations, even if you would not likte to eat the sandwiches they describe!!
Formative assessment - Assessment for learning - Integrated skills -
There are different ways to assess it: Portafolio, peer-assessment, observation sheet, mind maps
We expect participants to work in groups of three people and provide their own views on how assessment can change and become much richer if we consider each of the following:
Group formation.
Add your name to one of the groupsFramework for Formative Assessment based on competence
A task can be assessed by different agents:
In a task we can assess:
(Different 2.0 tools are implied in this, but this course is not focused in them, so we are not looking at them in this way here.)
For what purpose:
Different strategies would need different assessment tools:
A Formative Assessment Programme
GROUP 1
An activity that springs to my mind is very similar to Nuria's. Students write a paragraph about their partner after a get to know activity. I collect the paragraphs and point out a single mistake from each paragraph for students to correct in groups. In the next class students try to work out the mistakes in groups. Then each student in the group explains why the sentence is wrong and how it should be corrected. For homework students upload their corrections and explanations on the class wiki.
Assessment: students get a gold star for the oral presentation and another gold star for uploading the correction on the class wiki.
The oral presentations also allow to give students feedback on pronunciation.
It addresses the four skills
Assessment is based on participation
To reflect on language
To foster participation
To foster language accuracy
GROUP 1
Creating mind maps can be a very good activity as well. Students get marks or gold stars for creating mind maps for vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, spelling. Mind maps can help visual learners.
Assessment can be based on producing mind maps and incorporating them into the Portfolio.
GROUP 1
Redrafting is another tool for formative assessment which I already use. Here is an example that can be modified and tailored to suit other needs:
1. Students finish a draft of their text and exchange them to get
feedback from their peers.
2. The teacher collects in the students’ texts and indicates where there
are problems.
3. In pairs or small groups students help each other to make sense of
the corrections that the teacher has pointed out in their written work.
4. The teacher monitors and helps the pairs and groups, clarifying
anything that is unclear in the marking.
5. Students write the next draft of their text incorporating the feedback.
Assessment is based on getting gold stars for solving the problems and incorporating the feedback.
GROUP 1
This activity can be given different titles, such as “The Start of my life” or “Getting to know you”.
The aim of the activity is to introduce yourself (as a teacher) to the class students as well as getting some information about them; it is a perfect ice-breaker for the first day of class.
This activity can be applied to all levels, as far as we as teachers are aware of the type of questions they are able to produce.
The only material we need is a Power Point slide showing a picture of us (if possible) and 5 or 6 words which are related to us. The students have to guess the meaning the words have in our lives asking questions. Then you can extend the activity making them write on a piece of paper 3 or 4 words related to them and the rest of the class have to guess what they mean for them.
Depending on the course level I would put more difficult or easier words to guess so that they have to produce easier or more complex questions. That is to say, I would guide them to produce simple common questions in 1st E.S.O, such as “Where are you from?” whereas I would guide them to questions such as “Have you ever been to...?” in 4th E.S.O.
I think this is a very engaging activity because students usually are willing to know information about their teachers. The only two problems we can face are on the one hand the loss of interest in the activity if they know each other well because then the guessing game is non-sense. On the other hand it can be difficult for low level students to produce a grammatically correct question, making some students tongue-tied and unable to speak.
We can try to avoid these problems using this activity only when we are sure they do not know each other (1st E.S.O) and also pre-teaching them the structure of the questions.
We can also group them in mixed-ability groups so that they can help each other building the questions.
A formative assessment activity can be trying to remember the information, trying to remember the questions. In order to do this the teacher could adapt the checklist of items to include in a learning diary to include specific activities like this, e.g., sts have to include some evidence of the activity “Getting to know you” in the diary entry.
GROUP 1
This activity is called “Putting yourself in someone’s shoes”.
It encourages our students to give their opinion about a topic and at the same time it makes them think about their social environment and be aware of the differences and similarities among cultures, beliefs, etc.
This activity can be used at any level, always bearing in mind their knowledge and to what extent they are able to produce or to describe a person, and so on. Therefore the first activity I would do is to run a brainstorming session in order to think of as many adjectives as possible, which can be understood as a warm-up activity.
Before I present the activity itself to the students, I would ask them some questions related to the topic we are going to speak on, such as if they judge a person just by looking at the clothes he or she wears; if the clothes we wear tell a lot about ourselves and things like that.
Then I would put them together into groups of 3 or 4 and would give them a picture where they can only see someone’s shoes. The first thing they have to do is to describe the shoes they have in their picture. Then I would make them hypothesise about the type of person who could wear the shoes, if he or she is young or old, what kind of job he or she does... and so on.
Then I would give them the complete picture so that they can check if their guesses were right or wrong and make a complete description of the picture.
As a follow-up activity we can expand the topic and work on stereotypes, how we tend to classify people and to what extent the stereotypes are right or wrong.
We can also work on urban tribes, which I think would be a really appealing topic for them and one which would make them engage in the activity.
I think that this is a very attractive activity for our students and I do not think it can have many problems. The only limitations students can find is the lack of vocabulary to make the descriptions, but it can be solved by pre-teaching the vocabulary and running a brainstorming session at the beginning of the lesson, which would brush up their previous knowledge.
The assessment could be a project on urban tribes. In groups they create a poster showing various urban tribes. The focus of the activity is on content rather than accuracy. They get gold stars. I think a project like this could account for 10% of the mark. And again, the next way to assess it, it should be reflected appropriately in the corresponding diary entry.
Other formative assessment I can think of is creating a mind map with the adjectives used to describe people, their clothes, shoes, etc. A language spot on the order of adjectives plus a correction spot students have to do in groups based on the mistakes I have collected after revising the captions for their project (very similar to Núria's approach in the Kung Fu Panda activity, i.e., I try to get students to correct errors that I think are accessible to understand). Or even get students to do a quiz based on the project on urban tribes.
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GROUP 2
In this activity, the children are given a set of pictures which are in the wrong order (A recipe: How to make a sandwich). The teacher describes the pictures in the correct order and the children have to identify them in sequence. They may not understand everything hear. That is quite deliberate. We are encouraging them to use their ability to work on partial information and to take risks. It is easier for them to do both these things with listening than speaking, because they are being asked to respond not to produce the language themselves.
Possible follow up: Students can write the recipe, they might like to devise their own suprise sandwich. They can take the basic pattern of instructions from the board but choose their own ingredients. Let them use their imaginations, even if you would not likte to eat the sandwiches they describe!!
Formative assessment - Assessment for learning - Integrated skills -
There are different ways to assess it: Portafolio, peer-assessment, observation sheet, mind maps