This is the third and final iteration of my Formative Assessment Design. It is acting as a summative assessment of my understanding of the principles I’ve learned this semester in CEP 813.
Purpose of This Assessment
The purpose of this formative assessment is to provide information to the teacher and the student about individual progress toward learning goals. The context falls within an 8th grade English Language Arts classroom, in the middle of an essay-writing unit.
First, a word about rubrics. In any given writing unit, a grading rubric may be employed as a guide for final evaluation. As imperfect as rubrics may be, they can serve at least two valuable purposes: to lay out the goals of a writing piece and “help students both in evaluating each other’s writing and in assessing their own for revision” (Dean, 2006, p. 151). Instead of using a rubric only to give a final score on a final draft, I will be including it as part of a peer-evaluation, mid-unit formative assessment that will inspire student learning and guide teacher instruction.
The entirety of this essay unit aims for the majority of the Common Core Michigan State Standards for 8th-grade writing, and those goals are addressed in the rubric. This formative assessment, in particular, will touch on those, but its main focus is on two standards for revision and technology:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.8.5 With some guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on how well purpose and audience have been addressed.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.8.6 Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and present the relationships between information and ideas efficiently as well as to interact and collaborate with others.
Young writers often resist revision, but it is an essential part of the writing process. One underlying goal of this assessment is to help them practice revision strategies and see that it is a multi-step process. There are global changes a writer must make first (related to ideas, organization, voice, etc) before local changes (such as word choice and sentence fluency) can truly be fruitful. The assessment I explain below focuses on global revision, but it could easily be adapted to local revision for use after the global issues of a paper are addressed.
Class Instruction Prior to the Assessment
Earlier in the school year, students will have become proficient in giving effective feedback (Hattie & Timperley, 2007) through a series of mini-lessons and practices. Prior to participating in this formative assessment, the class will have had mini-lessons about each of the topics addressed in the rubric and each student will have written a rough draft of their personal narrative. At this point in the unit, I would help students uncover the what, why, and how of revision by modeling how to peer-evaluate using electronic tools and how to globally revise a narrative. Students will practice using Kaizena on a minor assignment the day before peer-revisions will take place.
Plan for Feedback
The main mechanism for feedback here is through peer-evaluation. For a teacher to give helpful, timely feedback on nearly two-hundred essays is unrealistic. Luckily, students can learn far more about revision when they review one another’s’ papers. Black and William (1998) affirm that “peers are usually honest and reliable in assessing themselves and others” and it’s “important that they have a clear picture of the standards they are working towards.” This is why I will give them a rubric to reference while they are giving suggestions and comments on others’ papers–to help them focus on the desired outcomes.
Students will practice what they learned earlier in the school year about three major components of effective feedback as explained by Hattie and Timperley (2007): 1 Feed up, 2 Feed back, and 3 Feed forward. They have learned that “recognition of the desired goal, evidence about present position, and some understanding of a way to close the gap between the two” (Black & William, 1998) is an effective way to give feedback. Providing guiding questions for their evaluation will help them avoid person-directed praise and instead encourage task, process, or self-regulation-based feedback (p.102-103).
Instructions for Learners
Before I get to the instructions, I must thank Deborah Dean (my writing professor at BYU) for providing excellent guiding questions for peer evaluation and author reflection in a ReadWriteThink lesson plan on revision. For this assessment, I use her reflection questions and adapt her peer evaluation questions.
I will ask each student to review two other essays so that authors have an increased quantity of feedback and as well as varied quality. At the end of the peer evaluation period, authors will report to me through an exit ticket how helpful their peers were in their comments and suggestions. I won’t award points for these; nevertheless, it will help hold peers accountable for making thoughtful evaluations.
Meyer, Rose, and Gordon (2014) say that assessments should be construct-relevant and accessible for all learners. To increase flexibility in the assessment, there will be an option for students to choose to give written or face-to-face feedback to peers instead of using Kaizena.
Instructions for the class on the day of peer evaluation:
- Open Google Docs and open your TIB rough draft.
- Share your draft with two other students in the class (I might randomly assign this) and give them permission to edit. Everyone should review two drafts total.
- Reference the TIB rubric as you follow the directions on this Peer Evaluation print out (see below) for two of your peers’ essays. Make comments directly on Kaizena.
- When you’ve finished evaluating others’ essays, review the comments made on your own doc and prepare for the exit ticket.
- In your exit ticket today on Canvas, you will rate your peer evaluators on a scale of 0-5 of how helpful their comments were for your writing. You will also tell me at least three specific, global changes you will make to your TIB during the next class period.
Below is the instruction sheet I would print out for each student.
Peer Evaluation for Global Revision of a This I Believe Essay
Instructions: Remember that global revision focuses on ideas, organization, and conclusions. Read the narratives that have been shared with you. Consider the following questions, making suggestions on Kaizena that will help the author (1) remember the goals on the rubric (2) notice where he or she is succeeding in those goals, and (3) have ideas about how to progress towards the goals.
Main Idea
What is the main idea of this narrative? Can a reader point it out? Is it an interesting, inspiring, or otherwise thoughtful idea?
Details
Which details are engaging and enjoyable to read? Where could the author add details that will help move the story along? Where could the author add description, dialogue, or an event?
Organization
Where are there gaps in the ideas or storyline? What could the author do about those gaps? How satisfying are the beginning and the ending? What could the author do to improve them?
Conclusion
Does the conclusion follow logically from the story told? Which details in the story help build up to that conclusion? What could be added or taken away from the body of the piece to strengthen the conclusion and tie up the entire essay?
Students would answer the following reflection questions after both global and local revisions have been completed on their narratives, but I include it here because it is one way to encourage transfer of learning:
“How is global revision different from editing (local revision)?
How will you apply what you learned about revision with this writing practice to other writing you do?” (Dean, n.d.).
Post-Assessment Instruction
After the peer-assessment is completed, students will revise their rough drafts and share them with me along with a reflection on their revisions. I will be able to view the changes they made on their google doc, and assess their level of understanding when it comes to global revision. If the majority of students met the goals for understanding, we could move to local revision and continue polishing their pieces.
Some specific markers I would look for in their revisions include major organizational changes, substantial content additions or deletions, expansion of the main idea, additional sensory details, or strengthened beginnings or endings. These types of revisions would show me that the student grasps the underlying concepts of global revision. Insufficient understanding would be evidenced by sentence level changes, word-choice substitutions, spelling corrections, or small additions to the paper that do not enhance the overall quality.
If I see a lack of understanding in some students, I could use Kaizena to give individualized feedback. Or, if the entire class performs lower than expected, I would use one or more of the following strategies to reinforce learning: return to inquiry strategies to strengthen main ideas, fat draft or rewrite the narratives in a different genre to improve descriptive details, or analyze well-revised essays from peers to understand the impact revision can have. These exercises would (hopefully!) lead to improved understanding and I could assess their learning through having them perform and turn in a second globally revised draft.
Rationale
Research has shown that “the most effective forms of feedback provide cues or reinforcement to learners; are in the form of video, audio, or computer-assisted instructional feedback, and/or relate to goals” (Hattie & Timperley, 2007, p. 84). For this reason, I have included two digital tools in this assessment process: Kaizena (for feedback) and Canvas (for the exit ticket and reflection). The first supports peer-evaluation and the second supports self-evaluation. I use Kaizena as a way for students to return again and again to their peers’ comments and Canvas for providing confidentiality when the students rate their reviewers and explain their personal goals to me. Furthermore, using voice comments on Kaizena will hopefully be easier and quicker for students than providing written feedback.
Students will learn the underlying concepts of revision through the process surrounding this assessment. As Wiggins and McTighe say, “The learner should come to understand the skill’s underlying concepts, why the skill is important and what it helps accomplish, what strategies and techniques maximize its effectiveness, and when to use them” (p. 133). Evidence of their learning is derived during instruction (Quellmalz, 2013) as this revision stage happens during the writing process–in class–before we even get close to a final paper deadline.
In giving formative assessments for writing, I don’t want to revert back to what I did as a student-teacher and give a rubric-based, preliminary score on a rough draft as the only feedback for my students. Research has shown that “if pupils are given only marks or grades, they do not benefit from the feedback” (Black & William, 1998). So, rather than giving teacher-generated scores on individual parts and pieces of writing, as the social efficiency and behaviorist theories would support, I hope this reflective, conversational way of revising approaches Shepard’s (2000) social-constructivist approach toward assessment. It communicates to students that writing is a creative process that requires iteration, feedback, and improvement, and that it can be done in collaboration with others.
References
Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. The Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-144, 146-148.
Dean, D. (2006). Strategic writing: The writing process and beyond in the secondary english classroom. Urbana, IL: NCTE.
Dean, D. (n.d.). Once upon a fairy tale: Teaching revision as a concept. Retrieved from http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/once-upon-fairy-tale-971.html?tab=4#tabs
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112.
Meyer, A. Rose, D.H., & Gordon, D. (2014). Universal design for learning: Theory and practice. Wakefield, MA: CAST.
Quellmalz, E.S. (2013). Technology to support next-generation classroom formative assessment for learning. San Francisco, CA: WestEd. Retrieved from https://www.edpolicyinca.org/sites/default/files/20130809_FA_Quellmalz%20report4.pdf
Shepard, L. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4-14.
Wiggins, G.P. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Retrieved from http://p2047-ezproxy.msu.edu.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/login?url=https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy1.cl.msu.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=133964&scope=site
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