Paul Black tells us that when the cook tastes the soup it is formative assessment and when the customer tastes the soup it is summative assessment.
This quote reminds me that as a teacher it is so important to check where students are at and then adjust my teaching before going on and to continue to do this until the outcomes are learned. Learning is a journey that rarely follows a straight and true path.
An assessment activity can help learning if it provides information to be used as feedback,by teachers, and by their [students] in assessing themselves and each other, to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes ‘formative assessment’ when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs. (Black et al. 2002)
A frequent misunderstanding is that any assessment by teachers, and in particular the use of a weekly test to produce a record of marks, constitutes formative assessment. It does not.
Unless some learning action follows from the outcomes, such practice is merely frequent summative assessment: the key feature, interaction through feedback, is missing.
www.mantleoftheexpert.com/studying/articles/Paul%20Black2007.
I was reminded how important immediate feedback is the other day while working on math centers. Working in a smaller group and giving immediate feedback as we were working on an outcome, I was amazed at what the students were able to come up with using personal strategies. They used the feedback from myself and peers to improve and justify their answers as they came up with them. It is a twisty road sometimes, but the rewards are big for student learning:)
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