scores and grades relate to their status on specific progressions of knowledge and skills teachers expect them to master.
Element 4, using informal assessments of the whole class, and element 5, using formal assessments of individual students, together allow teachers to monitor student progress, provide useful feedback, and ensure that all students are moving toward mastery of the content. Here, we describe how these elements might manifest in a mathematics classroom.
Element 4: Using Informal Assessments of the Whole Class
In the mathematics classroom, teachers create and use informal formative assessments to monitor student progress in order to differentiate instruction, reteach concepts and skills, address misconceptions, and to provide meaningful feedback. In this section, we describe the use of three specific strategies for informal assessment of the whole class in the mathematics classroom.
1. Virtual exit slips
2. Guided reciprocal peer questioning
3. Respond, summarize, question, connect, and comment (RSQC2)
Teachers can use these tools as response strategies for students when students are to address a question or prompt and for the strategy of unrecorded assessment, in which teachers use the assessment for feedback but not to score students.
Virtual Exit Slips
Exit slips are student responses to questions teachers pose at the conclusion of an instructional activity in which students reflect on the learning. Exit slips are an effective way to quickly assess students’ level of understanding and set up for the next learning opportunity. Marzano (2012) articulates at least four ways teachers can use exit slips, each having a different intended outcome.
1. To rate students’ current understanding of new learning
2. To analyze and reflect on students’ efforts around the learning
3. To provide feedback to teachers on a respective strategy
4. To provide feedback about the instruction and instructional resources
Virtual exit slips—those that use technology—can transform the way formative assessments take place in the mathematics classroom. Virtual exit slips provide the teacher with a more effective way of assessing student learning, because the feedback is immediate, interactive, and can be more efficiently tracked and saved. As with traditional exit slips, with virtual exit slips, teachers pose a question or prompt at the conclusion of a learning block or lesson, and students have the opportunity to respond. The difference is that rather than using paper and pencil, students respond through a variety of virtual tools, such as WeVideo, Flipgrid, Adobe Spark, and Canva, to name a few.
• WeVideo (www.wevideo.com): A creativity platform that allows students to create videos to deepen learning experiences
• Flipgrid (https://flipgrid.com): An online tool for sharing and discussion that facilitates students recording videos and replying to one another
• Adobe Spark (https://spark.adobe.com): An online platform that allows students to create beautiful presentations
• Canva (www.canva.com): An online tool that makes it possible to design anything and publish anywhere with thousands of customizable templates.
With these tools, students are able to reflect on mathematical thinking, create visual representations of mathematics concepts, or create mathematics videos. Students then post their responses through a district-approved and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)-compliant platform with teacher guidance, such as on the class learning management system (LMS), or share their responses via district-approved social media outlets (such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and so on). Virtual exit slips using tools such as those listed tap into student creativity. Students are intrinsically motivated to respond because they have choices (responding digitally in a medium they prefer) in the visual and text creation and they feel pride in sharing their creations online.
Virtual exit slips also allow mathematics teachers to provide input and feedback quickly to individual students (because cloud-based feedback tools allow for real-time, synchronous feedback), and teachers can then appropriately adjust instruction, properly scaffolding and sequencing the next day’s content in meaningful ways.
For the exit slip to be formative, there must be teacher and student action on the information. For example, the teacher must review answers, sort the results into groups (got it, almost got it, not yet), and then give each group a specific problem to begin the lesson the next day.
Figure 2.1 provides some prompts and sample responses from virtual exit slips in the mathematics classroom that teachers can administer virtually using Google Docs or other technology.
Guided Reciprocal Peer Questioning
Formative assessments should not only provide teachers with quick and ongoing checks for understanding but should also provide students with opportunities to learn while being assessed. During guided reciprocal peer questioning, students build inquiry skills while they go through the process of constructing questions. At the same time, they also develop metacognition skills through reflection. Teachers can provide scaffolding for this strategy by first issuing question prompts for students to choose from and then eventually asking students to create their own prompts. To aid in question generation, it’s useful to refer to the learning protocol of building probing questions. Former economist and educator Charlotte Danielson (2011) developed a framework for teaching that includes five mediational questions that teachers can use for guided reciprocal peer questioning.
Source: Kanold, Larson, Fennell, Adams, Dixon, Kobett, & Wray, 2012.
Figure 2.1: Prompts and sample responses using virtual exit slips.
1. Why do you think this is the case?
2. What would you have to change in order for …?
3. What do you assume to be true about …?
4. How did you conclude …?
5. How did your assumptions about _____________ influence how you thought about …?
For guided reciprocal peer questioning, teachers provide prompts during small-group collaborative learning and the appropriate amount of time (ten to fifteen minutes) to conduct the assessment. As students are discussing the prompts, the teacher circulates and records observations. Another key component of this strategy is capturing student reflection and thinking. Students can answer using voice recording, collaborative digital documents, notecards, and so on.
Respond, Summarize, Question, Connect, and Comment
RSQC2 is another formative assessment strategy that builds student thinking and learning while also providing teachers with evidence to check for learning. This protocol is unique in that it is structured to emulate the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create; Bloom, 1956). Additionally, the strategy to assess student knowledge is more effective because it not only focuses on connecting new concepts but also on building on previously learned concepts. It drives
