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Hi and welcome back to the VEX Classroom. Today, this is another installment of our series on Connecting Research and Teaching. In today's video, we're talking about Effective Formative Assessment Strategies. In another video, I talk about the purpose of Formative Assessment. In this video, we're discussing how one can actually implement Formative Assessment effectively.

So, you can see here on the board, we have five different strategies that you can use when implementing formative assessment. This comes from the work of Dylan Wiliam, really one of the foremost authors of formative assessment. We'll put a link to his website in the links below. These five steps, these five strategies for formative assessment, come from his writing, and we're going to talk about them now.

Step number one, clarify and share learning goals. It's very, very important that both you, the teacher, and the students are on the same page about what the end goals should be. In the previous video, when we talked about the purpose of formative assessment, we said that purpose number one was to be able to identify students' current level of understanding and the difference between that and the desired level of understanding. Well, you and the students have to have that same desired level of understanding. If you're on a different page than your students, then you're not going to be able to effectively implement formative assessment in your classroom. You have to make sure that both you and the students are on the same page.

In our VEX GO STEM Labs, at the play portion of the STEM Labs and also on the slides that we provide you, the teacher in those STEM Labs, we oftentimes have an animation that shows what the robot should actually be doing when the students complete the lab. You're not giving the students the answer; instead, you're just painting a picture for them of what the robot should do, so that again, you and the students are on the same page of what that desired result or that desired understanding should be. So, clarifying that at the very beginning is very, very important.

Step two, you have to elicit evidence from the students. That could be an exit slip that you provide for them. That could be the questions in the mid-play break that we give to them. We're going to link a knowledge base article below that talks about prompts that you can use to have coding conversations with your students. These could be questions that you just ask your students as they're participating in group work. But whatever it is, you have to be able to elicit that understanding from the students. You actually have to be able to ask them and see where they are. There's a lot of research that actually says, if you want to know how the students are doing, just ask them. So, self-assessment can be a very big part of this also, but you have to be able to elicit their evidence of learning.

The great part about formative assessment is that oftentimes step two can be done very easily. Again, something as simple as an exit slip or a question that you provide for the students, all throughout our different curriculum for IQ and V5, for example, we have check your understanding questions embedded throughout. Those can always be used for formative assessment.

Step three, provide effective feedback. So, after you've identified where the student's current level of understanding is and you know what the desired level is, how do you provide them feedback to essentially bridge that gap? There's going to be another video that talks about effective forms of feedback. So, we'll link that video below. I would encourage you to take a look at that because that's a topic in and of itself, and we'll go into more detail on that topic in the subsequent video.

Step four, activate students as owners of their learning.

Thank you for joining us in this installment of the VEX Classroom. We hope you found these strategies helpful and look forward to seeing you in our next video. Don't forget to check the links below for additional resources and information.

So with this, we really want to make sure that what we do here is ensure that students understand they should be the ones going through this process on their own. As opposed to formative assessment always being dictated by the teacher, we want to provide students with their own agency. A great way to do that is through models. We can model this all by ourselves as teachers; we can model this on our own.

There can be different scenarios in which we model the process of asking ourselves questions to gauge our understanding of a particular topic. It's always great to model ourselves as students to our students. For example, if you're in a language arts class and you're reading a text out loud, it's beneficial to ask questions and employ active reading strategies as the students are going through that. In the context of robotics, if you're building a robot, it's helpful to model for the students the questions they should be asking themselves as they build the robot and write code. You could put comments in the code as pseudocode to gauge your understanding of what you are doing as you go through it. These are all great strategies you can model for the students because, again, you're trying to explain to them that this is a great way to check their understanding, which will help lead to further learning.

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Last step, number five, foster collaboration. Formative assessment can be very effective when it happens amongst students. In our GO STEM Labs, for example, at the end of the STEM Labs, the last section is "share." We have engage, play, and share. During that share section, this is an opportunity for students to share what they learn, and we provide various prompts to facilitate this. During that time, it's a great opportunity for students to ask questions of their peers, fostering collaboration. Instead of the formative assessment questions and the eliciting of student understanding coming solely from you, the teacher, have it sometimes also come from other students. How do you have them do that effectively? Again, you would model it. You would model this for your students in the feedback portion when you are going through and asking questions and doing those types of things. By modeling that for the students, you can have them actually collaborate and give effective feedback, engaging in the formative assessment process with one another. Research tells us that's a great way and a great strategy to effectively implement formative assessment.

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Again, why are we spending this time talking about formative assessment? It's a very high-leverage way to increase student learning. By high leverage, I mean low effort from you, the teacher, but very high dividends at the end. Something as simple as an exit slip or some of the questioning that we have in the knowledge base article linked below—simple questions like that—are great ways to gauge understanding, implement formative assessment, and adjust your teaching as a result. Research is very clear that this will lead to more learning gains from our students. So again, it's an easy thing for you to implement, but it really pays big dividends. It's something that we definitely want to do in our classrooms.

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Thank you for paying attention to this installment of connecting research and teaching. There are some videos linked below, as I just mentioned, discussing effective feedback.

If you didn't watch that video on the purpose of formative assessment, I would encourage you to check it out.

I also encourage you to check out these videos in our series of connecting research to teaching.

Thank you very much.

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