Formative – the go-to tool for student growth
Summary
Formative is an easy online monitoring tool. Teachers can upload a pdf and build quizzes around it, but they can also create more complex assessment types. they can monitor Ystudent progress and easily provide feedback. Jorge Branco from Escolas Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro at Caldas da Rainha uses Formative to encourage students to learn independently, and provide feedback that guides the students in the right direction.
Keywords
Classroom polling, formative assessment, flipped classroom, online dashboard
Quick reference
Context
A quick-start tool
Instant feedback to students is a powerful practice to inform their learning because students can immediately see their errors. Teacher Jorge Branco from Escolas Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro at Caldas da Rainha likes using Formative, especially because when he assigns a task to students, he can see what they are doing in real-time. For instance, he sees students typing in their answers. Students can also answer by drawing an image, which is also seen in real-time. Additionally, he encourages students to learn independently and provide feedback that guides them in the right direction.
Formative (also known as GoFormative) is a web application for classrooms that allows teachers to give live assignments to students, enabling instant teaching adjustments and long-term student growth tracking. GoFormative also allows embedding any type of online content through an embed code. It also offers an interactive whiteboard on which teachers can draw, write, and comment on a picture or drawing that they can upload from their PC.
Teachers can upload their own documents that they can make interactive by adding response fields to them (see here for a video tutorial) which can save time from creating online quizzes from scratch. Teachers can also find existing content from the public library of the tool, that has hundreds of contents created by other teachers, making it easy to adapt something to one’s own curriculum. With this tool teachers can:
- Adjust the teaching approach based on student progress
- Effectively pace lessons
- Easily give written feedback to students
- Generate rich class discussions based on student work (exemplars, strategies, misconceptions)
- Decide what standards they need to focus on based on class and individual student averages
- Find out how they can best support individual students based on portfolios provided for each standard
- Inform collaborative planning (grade teams, co-teachers) based on results
- Use digital technologies, tools and resources
Teachers can create assessment activities of various types, from multiple-choice quizzes to drag-and-drop activities and provide instant feedback to a student’s response. For instance, a question may ask “what is the boiling point of water at a specific altitude of 1000m”. If a student chooses the wrong answer, the feedback could be to “check the section about the effect of atmospheric pressure”, or the teacher can set it to suggest checking an online video about the topic.
At the teacher level, the tool offers a free version. However, there is a paid version for school/district level capabilities that can help communication within the school, where multiple teachers can collaborate on the assessment of the same students.
The activity
Jorge uses Formative for teaching history, but it can be used for teaching any topic. He creates activities both for teaching and assessing knowledge. The teacher needs to give an access code to the students who use this code to enter the online environment that the teacher created for them. Jorge adds all the resources that students need to learn to the formative. He embeds text, videos, images. Students take it from there on their own.
The tool has a rich library offering content on history, literature, mathematics, or science, but also content more intended for soft skills or so-called 21st-century skills like critical thinking. These contents are called “formatives” within the tool.
By adding questions to Formatives Jorge can verify the understanding of students. He monitors student activity and gives instant feedback to students. Instant feedback is the key component of this form of activity; each student feels that their teacher supports them because the feedback is contingent on their response. There is almost no delay between what they do and the feedback they receive. Students can learn from their mistakes while the class is taking place.
Jorge also has the possibility to tag questions with standards for a better assessment. He can follow student progress live, therefore he can adjust his teaching approach based on that student progress or scaffold students to success.
After creating student accounts, Jorge assigns different exercise sheets (called “Formatives” in the tool) that become available on the student dashboards, meaning that different students can be assigned different activities. When a student starts a session in Formative, Jorge can follow how they are doing from the teacher dashboard. From there he can give written feedback that supports students that are struggling with a specific topic.
The teacher can display the data as a student list that shows student performance over time for an individual. The teacher can also look at the overall performance of students to spot the activities that seemed to be the most challenging and then readdress those challenging topics.
The scenario can be run fully online thanks to the classroom management aspect of Formative. All activities can be shared from a distance through this tool. Teachers can monitor student progress from its dashboard and prove scaffolding if necessary. However, to keep students engaged and motivated, the teacher might need to send regular posts, instructions, and videos also through other channels. This way the teacher can keep the class active remotely. In a full online setting, time spent online with the teacher could be used to discuss doubts and clear misconceptions.
Outcomes and lessons learned
If using Formative for the first time, teachers need to build online content for their students. This would be an entirely new practice for them if they never used online learning management systems and dashboards before. Nevertheless, it is not a start from scratch, because teachers can easily transfer non-digital material. For instance, if Jorge had a written quiz about Portuguese and Spanish exploration movements in history, he could upload this as a pdf file and then only recreate the multiple-choice options for students to record their answers.
Teacher Jorge started with a small collection of content. “I want to create a bigger collection of Formatives with different levels of proficiency.” he says. “That is for a more accurate formative assessment”.
In short, Jorge has been using Formative as an easy dashboard and monitoring tool for formative assessment in a student-led autonomous learning setting. Teachers can assess student knowledge, adapt/differentiate teaching according to identified needs, give feedback and scaffold students. Additionally, teachers can start discussions based on student answers and peer assessment.