Ms. Munn is preparing for her second year of teaching in fourth grade. Last year, she was disappointed that many of her students performed poorly on language arts assessments of skills such as summarizing, making inferences, and identifying the main idea in a passage. This year, she wants her students to do better. She wants to be able to recognize students' struggles before she gives end-of-unit

Question

assessments. Explain how you think she should approach the problem. In your answer, include the following:
Identify the kinds of assessments she should use and when she should use them.
Describe the types of information she should gain from these assessments.
Explain how she should use the information from these assessments to meet her goal.

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Suggested Response: Ms. Munn should use various types of formative assessment before and during instruction. Formative assessments will help her identify students' needs. If students are struggling with a particular aspect of one of the basic skills she is teaching, the formative assessments will help her recognize the struggles. Ms. Munn should use the information from the formative assessments to alter her instruction and provide what students need. Often formative assessments tell teachers that they need to give additional examples, monitor students as they practice the skill, and provide scaffolding with prompts and tips. By using formative assessments, Ms. Munn identifies students' learning needs before giving a summative exam over the material. Her students' learning should improve, because she will change her teaching to address needs.
Text Reference: Formative and Summative Assessment