Posts Tagged: formative assessment
Data Driven Instruction with Naiku
Premier educators such as Dr. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo (Driven By Data 2.0: A Practical Guide to Improve Instruction) and Dr. John Hattie (Visible Learning) promote the use of data in enhancing instruction and student learning. In this linked white paper, Dr. Adisack Nhouyvanisvong discusses these techniques and showcases how to implement them using Naiku.
Achieving Visible Learning with Naiku
Visible Learning is an excellent resource illustrating the effectiveness of student-centered learning which Naiku wholeheartedly supports. In Visible Learning and Visible Learning for Teachers, Dr. John Hattie (2009, 2012) synthesizes research studies involving hundreds of millions of students to show the effectiveness of different approaches to improve learning. Dr. Hattie found that student-centered learning strategies have the highest impact on learning. In particular, he found that strategies that help make student learning visible for the teacher are most effective. Because of that, Naiku allows teachers to transform the assessment experience into a learning … Read More
Use ACT Quick Checks for Progress Monitoring
Naiku provides over 50 ACT Quick Checks for teachers to use for student progress monitoring in all ACT test subjects. ACT Quick Checks are short, topic-focused, formative assessments; typically 6-12 questions in length. Each Quick Check contains questions from a single topic, such as Math-Functions, so teachers can use to easily monitor progress between benchmark assessments. There are multiple Quick Checks for each topic area so teachers may continue to monitor progress through the year. These ready-to-use assessments are available in all school site subscriptions within the ACT Practice Tests … Read More
Importance of Formative Assessment
Welcome back to this week’s edition of Naiku’s Coach’s Corner. This week, I want to discuss the importance of incorporating formative assessments into your classroom assessment practice. Formative assessment is a great way to measure a student’s performance during instruction, and usually occurs regularly throughout the instruction process. When we assess student learning for formative purposes, there may be no final mark on a student’s paper or summative grade in our grade book. Rather, formative assessment can serve as practice for our students, much like a meaningful homework assignment does. And the … Read More
We Are Naiku: Waverly-Shell Rock Middle School
Waverly-Shell Rock Middle School serves grades 5-8 students in northeastern Iowa. The school implements a 1:1 iPad program to integrate technology throughout the educational program in a seamless and timely fashion. For the past three years, the school has integrated Naiku into their classroom for formative assessment, progress monitoring, and reporting for their PLCs. Download this case study to learn how Waverly-Shell Rock Middle School integrated Naiku and their iPads for better assessment and better learning: Case Study – Waverly Shell Rock MS
New Quick Question Features
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Naiku releases two new features to their popular web-based student response system Quick Question. This free on-line formative assessment tool now allows teachers to 1) create questions on the fly in Quick Question and 2) save the data from the session for later viewing. When you launch Quick Question and start a question, you’ll notice that if you move your mouse over the question number, you can edit that field. This is where you type in (create) your question. In the figure below, you … Read More
Quick Question Quick Tip #3
Using Exit Tags with Quick Question Did you know that you can easily use exit tags with Quick Question? Starting an exit tag is easy – just press the exit tag button just as you would any other question type and the student devices are instantly updated. Students have predefined choices they can select (see student screenshot below) and can also add additional free field information. Remember that only you as the teacher can identify individual student responses (Quick Tip #1). So, the next time you need to check for … Read More
Quick Question Quick Tip #1
How To Identify Individual Student Answers Did you know that you can easily identify individual student answers when polling your students with Quick Question? It’s easy – simply hover your mouse over the answer selection, and a pop-up box will highlight all those students (or teachers if you are using in a staff meeting!) that have responded. See screenshot below as an example. Additional tips Interested in additional tips on how you can use your free Quick Question account? Visit www.naiku.net/QuickQuestion. And remember, if you like Quick Question, please share with … Read More
A Bring Your Own Technology (Device) Policy Statement
Here’s the policy statement that one of our client schools uses to guide their Bring Your Own Technology program. We’ve heard of too many schools agonizing too much, in our opinion, over drafting such a policy. It’s always good to have everyone voice their ideas and weigh-in on new innovations, but this isn’t that hard. The hard, but fruitful work, comes once the policy is in place. If you have variations at your school that you’d like to share, please add a comment below. Bring Your Own Technology – … Read More
One Big Idea
The central and core idea underlying formative assessment is that evidence of what students are learning is used to adjust instruction in order to better meet each student’s learning needs. Yet, something is missing from this idea. The focus is on instruction. What about the student? For assessment to be formative, both the teacher and the learner need to be actively involved in formative practices. So for Thompson & Wiliam (2008), the Big Idea of formative assessment can be expressed in the following way: Students and teachers Using evidence of … Read More
