The Power of Formative Assessment in Elementary School

Teachers, remember your days of taking exams? Have you ever crammed for a test and aced it only to realize that you didn’t really learn anything? Have you ever gotten the correct answer by eliminating wrong-answer choices, even though you really didn’t know the answer? Or even more cleverly, did you find the answer somewhere else on the test? The problem, of course, is that you were focused on getting a grade instead of learning. Sometimes as classroom teachers we participate by “teaching to the test” or focusing on test-taking strategies to improve student scores without making the intended impact on student learning.

As a former elementary teacher and administrator who now prepares new teachers, I think it’s possible that there is a simple solution to this complex problem, and chances are you already have everything you need to solve it. We can leverage classroom assessment—formative items that are assessed for student learning but not graded—to empower teachers and students.

Moving Beyond Standardized Testing

Goodhart’s Law states when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. In other words, when a measure is used to reward performance, we provide an incentive to manipulate the measure to receive the reward. In this case, sometimes we sacrifice learning in an effort to achieve a grade or a test score.

Consider standardized test scores. Let’s say second-grade students scored below the target score in mathematics. Do I focus my questions on potential causes like attendance or behavior? Do I look at individual student performance? State standards? Do I consider other factors, like the curriculum they used last year, or where we are in the scope and sequence? Or do I realize that the results of this test help point me in a direction, but they don’t provide the information I need to empower my teaching and student learning? Do I give another assessment? Collect more data? Faced with the complexity of teaching and learning and a measure that has become a target, do we fall prey to Goodhart’s Law?

The Power of Formative Assessment

The educational psychologist David Ausubel famously stated, “The most important single factor influencing learning is what the student already knows.” How can the data tell us what our students already know? How can we use that information to plan for what students are ready for?

Here is one math question we asked 85 second graders:

What number has 5 hundreds + 14 tens?

A. 514

B. 640

C. 615

Only 24 of 85 students answered this question correctly. Of the students who marked an incorrect answer, 56 of them answered A.

When I shared this information with second-grade teachers, they immediately knew what they needed to teach their students. Teacher agency comes from taking action. From this one question we could identify which students understood the place value concept and which students had partial understanding or a misunderstanding of the question, and teachers could use this information to plan instruction. We get this from classroom assessment. Some powerful things happened with this one question. It doesn’t just tell us what students don’t know; it also gives us a glimpse of what they do know. When we know what they know, we know what they are ready for, and that empowers student learning.

The best news is that you probably already have access to hundreds of questions like this in your common formative assessments or curriculum materials. You might have assigned a question like this today. If you saw a pattern of errors in student responses, take a closer look. What is it telling you about what your students know? What are they ready to learn? Not sure? Choose one question to ask students tomorrow to confirm. Ask a colleague if they are seeing a similar pattern. Consider showing students what you learned from their answers and how you are using it to help them learn. An all-time favorite strategy for implementing this in the classroom is “My Favorite No,” where the class works together to identify the most interesting wrong answers to a problem. These techniques help us uncover misconceptions that help students see and learn from their own mistakes.

Small Investments with Compounding Returns

What if we could do more with less? Formative assessments help us focus on our students and what they need. And the results don’t just add up, they compound.

Simply approach student work with curiosity. Ask yourself these questions:

• What skills do the students consistently use?
• Which do they use but confuse?
• What skills are completely missing?
• What are they ready to learn? What is the next skill to teach in the learning progression?

These small instructional moves have the potential to make a massive difference in teaching and learning. Points and grades can make school a system to be gamed where it’s risky to make a mistake. Instead, we want to see school as a place where it’s safe to show my teacher where I need help and to make mistakes. And if these ungraded assessments result in learning because we can be more precise with our instruction, ultimately students’ grades and test scores will improve.