The Importance Of Formative Assessment In Education

The second book assigned to me for my capstone leadership book is Leading with data: Pathways to improve your school. This topic is not a new subject to me with having read about data for several classes here at ACE. Data has never been so relevant in the field of education. Data is important to make changes on campus or illustrate results that must essential for schools to stay in operation. Every year schools look at data and decide what areas they need to improve upon if they want to make improvements on their student achievement. Schools use data to help figure out what professional development activities they implement throughout the year to strengthen a weakness. I know in my experience as a teacher we have had a lot of data driven …show more content…
“The logic of these ongoing assessments systems, or what is called formative assessment systems, is that they provide teachers with ongoing information regarding their students that can help teachers diagnose specific areas of need and thus teachers can modify instruction” (Goldring, 2009, pg. 77). As a current teacher, I use formative assessments in my physical education class and health classroom routinely. The data I gather from using these assessments helps me understand what areas of my instruction are students missing and what adaptations I need to make to help them understand better. All teachers need to be willing to assess their students and gather data to see if they are meeting their student’s needs. Testing students will help you understand if you can move on from a topic or what areas you may need to address to help with student understanding. It’s important as educators that we understand the use of formative tests on state standards will help us with our state standardized testing. “Standardized achievement tests and formative classroom assessments should be used hand-in-hand to drive instruction, and both types of assessments are integral to the data-based decision-making process. Often the distinction is made that summative assessments such as standardized tests entail assessment OF learning, while formative assessments are assessments FOR learning” (Goldring, 2009, pg. 78). This quote helps shape why we use different tests to find out what the students understand. We can also use the data from assessments to determine what areas of our teaching need professional development. In my experience schools have relied on data to determine what kind of professional development activities we need to implement. I know using assessments aren’t just used on students and staff. It’s