What are some cautions to consider when using formative assessments?
I’m going talk about one example of formative assessments: nine weeks tests, although it applies also to teacher made tests. The first caution, that scares me to death, is the quality of the item bank because you’re using these items to determine the quality of your program. If you have a poor quality item it’s going to give you a false positive or a false negative. So the number one thing that school divisions need to pay attention to is the quality of the item bank. Do they, in fact, measure the essential skills? Do they, in fact, ask the question at the same level of Bloom’s taxonomy that is in the essential skills? And it is in the right format? So that’s number one. Number two is, you need a security system so the teachers that don’t have access to the test items to practice with children before the nine weeks tests. We’ve had experience where children would look at an item and say, “Oh, I remember this.” And that’s because the teachers had used it so much in practice. Also you ne
