An important part of teaching is making the time to reflect on the effectiveness of the teaching and learning activities or tasks that you have designed and implemented in the classroom. This module explores how to review and refine the formative assessment task you administered in your class.
Activities
1. Watch the video 'Refine task'
This video describes the process of reviewing and refining your formative assessment task and administration guidelines. If you have any other colleagues who administered the task, it would be valuable to involve them in this review and refinement exercise.
The duration of this video is 4 minutes 48 seconds.
Module 9 – Refine task video transcript
Module 9 – Refine task PowerPoint
2. Gather feedback from colleagues
When implementing a formative assessment task, it can be useful to gather feedback about its implementation from teachers. The form below provides suggested questions to ask colleagues about their experiences with the formative assessment task.
Module 9 – Questions for teacher feedback
3. Ask yourself, did the task gather accurate evidence?
When you assessed students using the formative assessment task, this should have provided evidence of learning as described in the formative assessment rubric. Did the task enable the students to provide evidence of their learning against all the actions targeted in this task?
One factor that can influence the reliability of the evidence gathered is whether the students engaged with the task and therefore tried their best. Are there any improvements required to make the task more engaging, for example could you have given the students a choice about how to present the information?
4. Ask yourself, was the task easy to administer?
From your perspective, was the formative assessment task easy and quick to administer? If other teachers in your school or network used the task and rubric, they should have implemented the task in the same way, using the administration guidelines. Are there any improvements required to make the task easier to administer?
From a student’s perspective, was the formative assessment task easy and quick ? The students should have understood the task requirements with minimal additional assistance from their teacher.
The matching of student responses to the actions and quality criteria in the formative assessment rubric should be straightforward. The evidence elicited should match your formative assessment rubric and learning continuum, allowing quick assessment and interpretation of student work. Are there any improvements required to make the task assessment more efficient?
5. Evaluate your work
Would the changes you have made to the task do the following?
- Gather more accurate evidence
- Make the task easier to administer
- Make the task more efficient to administer or mark
Practice considerations
- If you were about to administer your formative assessment task again, would you change anything?
- The feedback from other teachers who administered the task will be the best source of information to decide if you need to make any modifications.
- Consider asking students about their experiences of undertaking the formative assessment task. Use similar questions to those developed for teacher feedback.
Additional resources
Refer to ‘Further reading’ on page 25 of The Guide to Formative Assessment Rubrics for some references specifically related to designing tasks to gather evidence.
Move on to developing and using more formative assessment rubrics to progress student learning
These materials were prepared in 2019. Please note that this area of research is evolving fast, therefore these materials should be supported with additional evidence bases that more accurately reflect best practice after 2024. It is recommended that these materials be used with consideration of updated research after this date.