Formative assessment or checkpoints

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In the last blog entry the focus was on the learning path and how we as teachers need to support our students' progress along the path. However, with the large classes we normally teach it is often simply not possible for the teacher to know where exactly the students are and what they are still struggling with. This is where formative assessment comes in. In the words of some teachers who participated in one of my last courses, we need to build some checkpoints into the learning path to make sure students have understood and are able to do certain things. After all, the learning path should put the building blocks of a certain text type at students' disposal, so that they can then build their own texts, and it is therefore important to give them enough time and opportunity to get familiar with these bulding blocks.

But what does formative assessment look like? Rather than explaining it myself, I am going to refer you to this very informative blog entry from Edutopia. 

Formative assessment should be easy and quick, and it really fulfils its purpose when it tells you what you need to spend more time on or who needs further help to deal with a given aspect of the text they will produce. Therefore calling it checkpoints along the path seems to me a brilliant idea! 








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