Journal Article: Resolving the Formative Assessment Catch-22

Waters, J. K. (2012). RESOLVING THE FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT CATCH-22. (Cover story). T H E Journal, 39(7), 8-14.

The article Resolving the Formative Assessment Catch-22 is written by John K. Waters. In the article, Waters describes a Catch-22 that teachers are experiencing when it comes to incorporating formative assessment. For the sake of the article, formative assessment is described as the “process through which teachers evaluate how well their students are learning while they are teaching them”. This process is widely accepted by teachers to be a best practice in education. However, the problem lies in the logistics. Teachers are asked to formatively assess students’ learning during instruction to drive instruction, but then need to use instructional time to formatively assess. One might hope that as technology advances, the tools that are used for formative assessment will advance as well, and help resolve this issue. Unfortunately, it appears that most technology tools used for assessment are aimed more for summative assessment rather than formative assessment.

Waters continues to describe how tools for formative assessment are advancing, just slowly. The strategy that is focused on for this article is the use of various student response systems (SRS). The most well known examples given in the article are the use of i>clickers and Smart Technologies. Both of these, as well as the other examples mentioned in the article, can be incorporated into lessons by teachers as a way to get a quick set of data that can then drive instruction. Waters does not make a recommendation for any specific system over a different one. Rather, the recommendation made is more of a best practice with these technologies, and how formative assessment should work in any classroom.

From the article, it seems that many teachers agree that formative assessment is a vital component to any lesson. However, some teachers fall into the root of giving a formative assessment and moving on regardless of the results. Waters talks about how the main purpose of formative assessment is to correct a misunderstanding or gap in knowledge immediately. This is the biggest take-away from the article for me. It is a great start to have different formative assessment tools in your classroom. Some examples of SRSs that I have used include Kahoot and Quizalize. To take these assessments further, I need to be using the results, question by question, to explain correct and wrong answers.