Assessment in its purest form serves to accelerate student learning, contribute to student efficacy and engagement, identify areas for further support, and deepen the relationship between teacher and learner.

- Oregon's Early Literacy Framework, p. 56

Step 1: Read

Let’s take a look at the second step in the formative assessment process to help answer the question, Where Am I Now?

Planning opportunities to elicit and interpret evidence in relation to the success criteria require tasks that support learning and make student thinking visible and audible. Evidence may be gathered through analyzing student work, observing, listening, questioning and discussing. Teachers and students alike can use the evidence they gather during tasks to inform feedback and next steps. This requires forethought and planning by teachers. In the accordion below, review some qualities of tasks that will support you to elicit and interpret high-quality evidence.

Tasks Should Be

Authentic: Address students’ lived experiences and communities. Tailor lesson goals, approaches and material to be relevant to students.
Rigorous: Promote deep, conceptual and higher order thinking.
Interactive: Invite collaboration, interaction and engagement among students and yourself to promote learning and to generate evidence.
Language rich: Integrate speaking, reading, writing and listening into a task and support students to use the range of linguistic resources they have. This includes integrating students’ sensemaking, expression and collaboration into learning.
Multimodal: Offer choices for students to access learning and for representing their knowledge and skills (e.g., verbally, pictorially, dramatically, textually).

- Adapted from Accelerate English Learner Success with Formative Assessment.

For the Youngest Learners

There are additional considerations that influence how evidence can be gathered and interpreted during tasks and activities. These students are in the early stages of

social development,
oral language development and
literacy development.

They also come to school with a broad range of experiences, capacities and exposure to schooling. Keeping these factors in mind will help you design age appropriate evidence gathering strategies and be able to interpret that evidence more accurately (e.g., determining if student actions are influenced more by emerging social skills or academic ones or a combination of the two). Often for very young learners, these evidence gathering opportunities occur while students are at play.

Check out this optional resource below, which describes a formative assessment practice for young learners called Learning Stories.

PDF - Learning Stories for Young Learners

Scaffolding with Formative Assessment Evidence

One of the most important purposes that formative assessment evidence can be used for is to determine what supports and scaffolds students need to access grade level content, practices and materials. This is key in supporting success for all students when planning and facilitating tasks. Keep in mind that multilingual learners in particular may need additional language supports and could exhibit greater fluidity between languages and/or dialects of English.

Step 2: Explore

Reflect on an upcoming lesson and ways it does or does not exhibit the characteristics of a rich, authentic task.

Then, check out this handout that lists types of scaffolds that can be used to support all learners to access grade level literacy tasks and materials. It also includes types of formative assessment evidence that indicates their need, with additional information on evidence from English learners. See if you can identify one scaffold you can incorporate into an upcoming lesson.

PDF - Scaffolds and Reasons to Use Them