Formative assessment

Exciting title, no? I learned this phrase from the teams building our new medical school, though I'd already experienced the need for the term.

Summative assessment, as it turns out, is the type most of us are used to. We give an exam, or a paper, and we give a grade. Bam, the student is supposed to understand how well he or she did.

Problem is, usually with a summative assessment, that's it, the end of the road. We give those exams or papers at the end of the semester, and if the student didn't do as well as they (or we) had hoped, well, too bad, better luck next class.

I experienced the need for a different type of assessment during the painfully bad presentations my students gave the first time I taught my class on global media. Even in the midst of watching presentations that were sadly lacking in research, application of any of the theory we had supposedly learned through the semester, or even coherence, I realized that it wasn't the students' fault. It was my fault. Because no one gets something right the first time they do it. Even though those students had undoubtedly done presentations at some previous point in their lives, they hadn't done presentations for me, and they hadn't done presentations on global media.

Enter the idea of formative assessment. It's pretty simple, really: with this type of assessment, the student has opportunity and direction to improve. It happens a lot more frequently, and is followed by the opportunity to do better.

I like this much more than the habit of some of my colleagues to let students rewrite and rewrite a paper, for instance, until they get the grade they're shooting for. Of course students should be able to improve. But somehow rewriting a paper over and over always seemed like way too much work for me and not much payoff for them. Did they ever really understand what they were trying to do with the paper? Or did they simply apply what I asked them for in the notes until they got the grade they wanted? Plus, without a grade on the earlier drafts, there were no stakes to the work. I have noticed that students who know they will get a chance to (or be required to) rewrite papers repeatedly turn in papers that ... don't demonstrate a lot of pre-existing work.

Grades are stakes. Students understand that. But grades given more often, with therefore slightly lower stakes, can be an inducement to improve.

When I reworked my global media class, I had students give presentations almost every week. Not every student could do it, but every student had at least one opportunity to do it - and they were not only graded by me, they were graded by their colleagues, right there in the class. Want stakes? There's stakes. Students had a strong inducement to improve - and opportunity to do it. (The first students who presented got a chance to do it again later in the semester if they chose to do so. All of them chose to do so!)

I'm not even sure that formative assessment is that much more work for the professor. Low-stakes quizzes or short writing assignments (even informal ones, such as blog or discussion board posts) can be prepped ahead and even reused. Usually you're not trying to prevent cheating; you're just trying to give the student a signpost as to how well he or she is doing before he or she smashes into the brick wall of the end of the semester summative assessments.

I read an article this fall in which the author pointed out that most of the students we are now teaching are very familiar with one type of formative assessment: video games. At the end of any round in which you don't succeed, you die. Picture how students deal with this type of feedback, as opposed to the attitude with which they receive grades on smaller quizzes or papers. Do they ever try to negotiate with the game to re-do the round? No; they know they can, but they lose points/experience/time by losing the first time around. They seem to understand that they are getting tools, experience, and resources in the earlier rounds that they can use in the later ones, towards the climax of the game. Do they understand that about their educational experiences?

I'm not one who thinks that video games can be a part of any college class. But this analogy interests me, and I try to follow it when I think about formative assessment. Got an F on the quiz? Yep, well, you died this round; do better next time, or you might never make it to the end!

It also helps me to have really clear goals for the class. Ideally, of course, I'd like my students to remember something from the class about the relationship between economics and content in popular culture products worldwide, and maybe even remember a few salient facts about what's popular in Japan or Australia and why. But what I really want is for them to remember how to do research on their own and start stitching it together into their own analysis. I am, after all, still a recovering composition teacher: I want them to formulate a hypothesis and support it with research.

So to that end, I gave up most of my lectures about international media. As it happens, I got out pretty much everything I wanted to say about it in my reactions to my students' presentations. (Not too surprising.) And in hearing what I had to say, not as a lecture, but as a response to one of the students' presentations, I really think it had more import and more interest. They themselves asked the questions and set the stage. They created their own need to know. By responding, I gave them everything I really wanted them to know about, and probably more.

Their presentations, by the way, were really, really good. I am now a believer in formative assessment!

So if you want your students to accomplish something specific, I recommend giving them multiple chances to do it in a semester; attach stakes to the attempts; and give as much feedback as you can (though even just a letter grade is a good marker of success or failure) every time, to let them know how well they're doing and give them a chance to change direction whenever it's necessary.