Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 4 | The Impact of Data on Education, page 3

Formative Assessments
The vast majority of students at Ware Elementary School in Fort Riley, Kansas, are different from those at most other elementary schools in one tragically fundamental way. Anywhere from 70 to 75 percent of the nearly 600 youngsters who attend the school have at least one parent at war either in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Fort Riley, located in western Kansas, is home to the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division. Even during the best of times, it has a high mobility rate, and seven years ago, before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, before the invasion of Afghanistan later that year, and before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Ware Elementary School was one of the worst performers in the state. Now it’s one of the best, and Deb Gustafson, who took over as principal in the 2001-2002 school year, credits the use of formative assessments with the school’s turnaround.

At the time, formative assessments were much more of an anomaly than they are today. They had not yet been adopted by the state as a standard practice for monitoring student progress, and the ones used at Ware were homegrown, paper-and-pencil tests developed on site by reading and math teachers at each grade level.

Within a year’s time, Ware had become a school of excellence, and today, anywhere from 97 to 100 percent of the students are either meeting or exceeding state proficiency levels. Never mind that most come from the military’s “blue collar” ranks and 82 percent qualify for free and reduced lunch.

Ware used its own assessments for five years, and last year it switched to an online version provided by the state, but teachers still supplement the state assessment with questions of their own.

The tests, Gustafson said, help the school provide individual academic plans for each student. They are first administered on the second full day of school in math and reading, immediately telling teachers where the students should be placed in the school’s Success for All reading program.

The students at Ware, Gustafson said, come from all over the world. They speak 27 languages. “We have to assess what they know and then make a plan to get them caught up with Kansas standards.”

The assessment is then given every quarter, or nine weeks. And in the spring, the third, fourth and fifth graders take the state-mandated, end-of-the-year test, the Kansas Computerized Assessment. By then, Gustafson said, “We can predict very well how many will be successful.”

Formative assessments are very different from end-of-the-year tests, or summative assessments, which are good at distinguishing between students who are proficient and those who are not. Summative assessments have a lot of questions clustered around the line that distinguishes those whoa are proficient from those who are not, said Ross Wiener, Policy Director for the Education Trust.

In contrast, formative assessments are a diagnostic tool. “Even if it’s multiple choice,” Wiener explained, “the wrong answers are arrayed in such a way that you learn something....They don’t just break out which students got this question right, which ones got it wrong. Of the students who got it wrong, which ones answered C, which ones answered D? Because if they answered C, it’s likely that they are misunderstanding the question in some way.”

Another key to formative assessments and what distinguishes them from the regular quiz, test or homework assignment is that there is no grade. They are not a high-stakes test. “The minute you call it a quiz and put it in your grade book,” said John Poggio of the University of Kansas, “everyone has a different relationship with that exam.”

Poggio is the Director of the Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation at the university, which has been running the state’s educational testing program since 1980.

In the spring of 1980, he said, “We started out building tests in reading and math.” The center created three generations of tests, which evolved into “really tough and challenging” exams in the 90s. Since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, he said, “there’s been a peeling back of those extraordinarily challenging tests.”

But there’s also been an exponential increase in the use of formative assessments, and that’s also due, at least in part, to an aspect of NCLB that Poggio applauds. It mandated testing all kids at several grade levels and holding schools accountable for the performance of all students regardless of race, special education status or English proficiency.

“It placed accountability at the building level. A lot of states...thought the student was responsible,” Poggio recalls. “If the pass rates are shoddy, it’s the school that’s messing up...Blame the principal. Blame the superintendent.”

Formative assessments are rapidly becoming the norm for another reason as well —technology. They were first used in the late 1960s and educators became increasingly aware of their effectiveness, Poggio said, but “the problem with formative testing is you could never turn tests around fast enough.” Not until the advent of online testing. Then they began to emerge as a viable diagnostic tool.

Poggio’s office started to administer formative assessments in the 2002-2003 school year on a limited basis. About 45 school districts made use of a seventh grade math assessment. The tests went online in 2004-2005, and by last year most of the state’s 1,700 schools administered a total of 2.5 million formative tests at various grade levels and in an array of subject areas.

“Just about every school district in the state is using them now,” he said. And they have the option of using them as often as they like—weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever suits their instructional needs.

Two perks to the process are the price (it’s free) and the freedom (it’s not mandatory). Another is speed. The University of Kansas posts the results of each test online by 6 a.m. the following morning. They’re usually ready within 20 minutes, he said, but just to make sure they’re delivered on time, no promises are made until first thing the following day.

Amidst all the good news, there is a downside, Poggio said. “Educators get fooled by the test. They think somehow the test is instruction, that by taking the tests repeatedly, kids will do well. That’s wrong.”

“Children are going to do better when you teach them the content,” he said. “What I’m learning, painfully, is that...too many kids are simply taking these tests and not getting enough
formal instruction.”

To fix the problem, the center has taken formative assessments a step farther. Poggio and his staff are providing instructional materials with a smaller version of the formative assessments so that teachers place the focus back on instruction. Poggio calls them formative lessons, and they provide educators with the exact materials they need to teach a given lesson.

The formative lessons are one way the state is addressing an ever-present risk of testing programs—the inevitable hope that the tests alone will be a cure-all of sorts. But in successful schools, that is not the case. Effective schools are known for constantly monitoring where their students stand, but they also have myriad programs in place to help their students excel.

At Ware Elementary School, the tests are an integral part, but only one part, of an overall strategy to provide each student with a great deal of support and individualized attention. Before the school year even begins, teachers visit each of their students, take them a small gift and visit their parents or caretakers. “Our school is a very positive school,” said fourth grade teacher Lisa Akard. “The kids come first.”

Throughout the year, grade level teachers, along with instructors in special education and English as a second language, hold weekly focus meetings to discuss their students, their teaching strategies and any other course of action—after-school tutoring, for example—that may help a given student. “Nobody’s lost at Ware,” Akard said.

In addition to the academic focus, students receive enthusiastic support for their work, including their progress on formative assessments. “We make a big deal of it,” Akard said. “We keep things positive and exciting.” One way they do that is by encouraging students to celebrate, to beat on their desks, to cheer and make noise both before and after the test.

One year, as Akard’s students walked from their classroom to a computer room to take the test, she led her students in a military style chant. It went like this:

“I don’t know but I’ve been told, Ware Bears are as good as gold. While we’re working on this test, we promise to give it our personal best.”

It can get loud, Akard said, but “we don’t scare them off with the test. By the time they take it, they’re saying ‘bring it on. I’m ready.’"

Next page: Brooklyn Bridge Academy (BBA) is one of 30 transfer schools in New York City’s public school system.

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