Formative Assessment Project:


I did my project using my POD class consisting of 40 seniors. The project began with me giving a handout of major court cases in American History, landmark decision types of things. They were given a class period and a half to fill out this worksheet. We used the other half of the period to talk through the more difficult cases and what was happening. The following day I gave these students a quiz to check for understanding of these cases. If a student received a 7 out of 10 or better they moved on and if not they would have to be retaught and repeat the quiz (no grade book grade was given). On the first try 16 out of 40 passed with a 7 or more. 24 students were retaught the material. On the retake 20 of 24 passed and only 4 were re-retaught. When students were finished they moved on to an enrichment project that had them working on reading though opinions from court officials on the Brown v. EMA case that dealt with violent video games. Summative assessment will come later on the unit IV exam next week.

Thoughts:

I am not sure if the reteaching of the material really made all that much of a difference, or if it was more the fact that the students who didn't pass didn't like the idea of falling behind their peers. They also claimed it was a "violation of no child left behind" because the other group was moving on with out them, I assured them it wasn't and that NCLB would be happy that they were receiving the individual attention that they needed.
I am also not sure that you could constantly be reteaching like you might need to, because can you expect half or more of your class to go off and learn on their own all the time? At this point I know I do a lot of formative assessments just by asking questions, but big projects like this are good to see who really understands and who doesn't. It will be interesting to see if there is an improvement in summative scores vs. last years seniors.