Summative & Formative Assessment

High School Physical Science Assessment Strategies

As a future teacher it's important to understand what your role as an educator is. A teacher plays many roles in student's lives and one of them is to make sure your students are fully "getting" the content that you're teaching. This blog post is going to address both summative and formative assessments that will help me as a teacher evaluate the student's performance to see if students are grasping it. The standard that these are going to be applied to is the -- HS-PS2-1. Analyze data to support the claim that Newton’s second law of motion describes the mathematical relationship among the net force on a macroscopic object, its mass, and its acceleration.

Formative Assessment - "Quiz Breaks"

One formative assessment strategy that I can apply is by doing "Quiz Breaks." After a lesson has been fully taught, an opportunity for any questions have been answered, and practice questions in class have been done a quiz break is given to test the knowledge of the students. Before the quiz breaks students are responsible for raising their hand and asking any questions or even just stating that they do not understand. Students must be given every opportunity to ask questions and given practice questions. The quiz break technique is an enticing strategy to ensure that students are paying attention in class as they know a quiz break is possibly approaching.

If a student is absent the day that a quiz break is given the student must ensure that this is made up after or before school. The student has the same exact opportunity as any other student to ask any questions to the teacher.

This quiz break ensures that students will be able to complete the group project and also the individual project that is required as one of the objectives. Instead of just throwing the students into doing a project and having no assessment to see if student's are fully prepared for success the quiz break will be able to tell the teacher if they are ready or not. The quiz also assesses if the students are ready to take on more complex questions and also for any other assessments at the end of the unit such as a unit exam or written assessment. The quiz is also great for making sure that students are understanding the little details to a process. For example converting units is a skill that students will learn first as this will be used throughout the year, yet very important part of learning a new equation or process. Quizzing the students on something they learned at the beginning of the year an jog their memory and ensure that they memorize it throughout the year.

                               Summative Assessment - "The Final Project"

Speed of the car project: This project will test the students on their knowledge of how mass and acceleration go hand in hand. In Newton's second law it states force = mass x acceleration. The students will take a toy car (students will note the mass of the car) and using different ramp heights. Students are given materials for the project but are required to set up and build the project to fit their individuality and creativity. The mass of the car will keep changing as well as the distance traveled and height of the ramp. This project will give students a visual of the equation while they solve it. This project is challenging as students will have to record any change they made in the project to figure out the pattern, create a chart, and fix any issues with the toy car in order to manipulate the acceleration or force. At the end of the project the students must be able to show their observations, write an essay on what they found during their experiment/project, and show all calculations and demonstration to the classroom. This final project help the teacher assess all the objectives as the final project is part of the objectives. The final project helps the teacher know if students are understanding the equation and how to apply it to a real-life scenario. Students are also going to be required to convert units during this project as that is one of the objectives. Students are also going to be able to use tables and charts to keep track of their project/experiment and also requiring them to write up their findings. This project ensures that the teacher is assessing all of the objectives for the standard.

References

Tools for Formative Assessment[PDF]. (n.d.).