Mod 26 Blog

Blog Post 1

• Discuss one question, confusion you have from reading Modules 26 and 28

I was wondering about how a teacher picks the grading model they want to use. While criterion-referenced letter grades seems to be the most fair to me since you are getting the grade you earned, why do some teachers chose to curve grades or base it on growth?

• One of the big ideas for Module 26 is understanding the difference between formative/summative/informal/formal forms of assessment. Despite some intuition, a formal assessment can be formative and a summative assessment can be informal. Fill in an example of how each of these can be used. You can use the chart, make your own, or write them out.

	FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT	SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT
FORMALLY ASSESSED	Short quizzes and homework assignments can show progress throughout the unit of the subject. These are preplanned and results show the instructor the status of the class’s understanding of the unit so far in order to make any changes if necessary.	A final exam at the end of the unit is used to assess how much information the student learned and how much progress they made from the formative assessment. The teacher can assess also how well they taught the information by how well the students did.
INFORMALLY ASSESSED	Asking questions throughout a lesson in class can informally see how much a student understands as the information is being taught. If little understanding is shown through incorrect answers, the instructor would know to spend extra time on the subject or explain the lesson in a different way.	At the end of a lesson from day to day, a teacher can assess how much a student understood or participates based on their behavior after class. If the student seems to be sleeping in class or extremely focus and taking many notes, the instructor would notice and can assess based on effort.

• SIMPLY BY LOOKING AT IT (or watching it), how can you tell whether an assessment is formative or summative? .... (HINT: This is a trick question. You can't, but why?)

Formative and summative are both assessing a student’s progress in the course and how well or poorly they are doing. You cannot tell by just looking at them because they work together. As a student goes along in a unit, it is formative assessment. Once the unit is completed, a test can be an example of a summative assessment. However, a quiz within a unit can be seen as formative assessment but can also be summative assessment since it could be concluding a subsection in the unit.