Performances
of the students are the direct result of motivation and self-esteem of
individuals, and assessment can break or make the student to motivate and
achieve greater learning outcome or lose the interest and impede the student
learning. Assessment can be broadly categorized into two types: formative and
summative, depending upon the methods used in the assessment process. Depending
upon the intention of the assessment, both the summative and formative assessment
can be employed. However, if the intention is to promote the student's learning
outcome, formative assessment is the indispensable tool owing to its technique
of constant monitoring with timely and constructive feedback.
For the formative assessment to be
effective there are five elements to be considered and tenaciously carried out,
i.e. recognition of the greater influence
assessment has on the motivation and self-esteem of students, provision of
effective feedback to students,
active involvement of students in their own learning, adjustment of teaching to
take into account the results of assessment, and need for students to be able
to assess themselves and understand how to improve.
These five elements are not separate ideas, they are interconnected and equally
reinforcing, and if one fails then others becomes less effective. If these five
elements are taken care, then the student's learning outcome will be inevitably
enhanced.
The first element is recognition of the greater
influence assessment has on the motivation and self-esteem of students, the
motivation and self-esteem are two main factors which largely determines the
student's learning outcome, and low achievers are often associated with lack of intrinsic
and extrinsic motivation and low self-esteem. So formative assessment gears to
this need by constant monitoring the student's work and providing the guidance
through proper feedback.
The second element is provision of feedback, in the
formative assessment students are provided with timely feedback along with
identification of his or her weakness and strength and with the plausible way
forward. Thus, students are guided to achieve the instructional goals, knowing
what exactly the problem is and how to overcome that problem to get to the
targeted goals.
The third element is active involvement of students
in their own learning, in the formative assessment students take ownership of
their learning, formative assessments' technique provides room to manoeuvre their
reasoning abilities and produces their best answers which latter can be
streamline and redefined by the feedback of teachers. If the student does not
take the ownership of their learning, feedback of the teachers would sound
alien to them, often leading to the confusion. Thus, the active involvement of
the students in their own learning is a critical element of the formative
assessment.
The fourth element is adjustment of the teaching to
take into account the results of assessments, formative assessment can improve
the outcome of the student due to the fact that the teachers uses the formative
assessment to redesign and adjust the teaching, encompassing and identifying every
need of the specific students.
The fifth
element is need
for students to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve, in
the formative assessment the students asses themselves through the use of self-assessment
and peer assessment despite the assessment from teachers and with the proper feedback
and precise way forward students are directed with tools to achieve the
targeted instructional goals.
However,
some may share the opinion that formative assessment is time-consuming which
often leads to problem with coverage of syllabus, indeed it is true that it
takes time but when it is the concern of improving students learning outcome, going
extra mile and assessing students through formative assessment is a plausible
and logical solution. When it comes to coverage of the syllabus, knowing a small
portion of information with greater depth is always better than knowing a bit of everything. So, the need to know in detail supersedes knowing all the
content.
In the nutshell, when
a teacher teaches, no matter how well he or she might design a lesson, what a
student learns is unpredictable. Students do not always learn what we teach.
That is why the most important assessment does not happen at the end of
learning – it happens during the learning, when there is still time to do
something with the information. So, it is logical to recommend the
formative assessment as the powerful pedagogical tool to enhance student's
learning outcome
Tags
Empowering students