USING PROJECTS AND PERFORMANCES TO CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING

Much of the work that students do in classrooms focus on the projects and performances that
mark each unit. Even though they are often featured near the end of the learning cycle, they can
also be used as a means for formative assessment throughout the unit.

Shadowing and Reiteration

A formative assessment technique that typically occurs early in a lesson is shadowing. This
technique requires students to replicate a movement or skill so that the teacher can assess how
closely they are approaching competence.

Ex: A dance teacher, for example, demonstrates a series of steps and then breaks them into
discrete movements as students mirror her. She rapidly scans the group and coaches individual
students who are not yet fully executing the move.

Checklists During Projects

Most projects take a relatively long time to complete (often several class periods) and can
quickly go astray if there is no method for checking progress. Checklists are a great tool for
keeping students on track and for checking their growing understanding of skills and concepts.

Ex: Checklists have been useful for Dr. Moore, a 9th-grade English teacher. Dr. Moore’s students
write a letter to her each week about the text they’re reading independently (Frey, Fisher, &
Moore, 2009). This practice allows her to stay in communication with them about their reading.
Because keeping track of 150 readings a week is difficult, Dr. Moore developed a checklist to
accompany the weekly literacy letters (see Figure 3.3). The checklist that students use each
week includes items that have become routine, such as underlining the title of the book, and
some that are more complex, such as asking questions about how the story would be different
if the main character were older or younger. The checklist gives Dr. Moore a way to check for
understanding with her students before they finish the assignment.

Presentation

Presentations can also be an excellent way to assess student knowledge about a topic. There
are ways to structure presentations so that you can gather formative, not just summative,
information.

The availability of technology has made some of this information gathering much easier to
accomplish today.

Ex: Ms. Alexander teaches 4 th-grade students, many of whom are English language learners.
“I’ve become a big fan of student-made podcasts,” she says. Indeed, technology has become
easier to access, and her students have become very adept at it. “One of the things I like about
the podcasts is that they are easy to rerecord,” she adds. “Some of my students are reluctant
to speak in front of others, and this gives them a way to play back their podcast before posting
it. If they don’t like it, they delete it and do it again.”

“Once they’ve got their draft presentation posted, I listen to it and do some initial assessment. I
record further questions and suggestions for them so that they can make any changes
necessary. Once they’re ready, they open it up for the entire class to view.”

USING TESTS TO CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING

Although tests are most commonly used as summative assessments, they can also be used in
formative ways, such as when they are used as quizzes to check for understanding. Tests that
rely on recall rather than on recognition have a greater ability to strengthen learning.

Short Quizzes

Make sure quizzes are always presented as learning devices and not as tests that merit a grade.
A quiz or test to be informative to the learner, it must include a mechanism for correction. If a
quiz is simply corrected and graded, it is unlikely that much new understanding will occur.

Self-Corrected spelling

Each day, students spend a few minutes writing target words as the teacher reads them aloud,
and then they correct each word letter by letter. They look at each word from left to right, using
an editing code for each omission, insertion, or substitution.

The practice effect, and the deliberate focus on errors and correction, improves students’
spelling performance substantially.

Cloze and Maze Procedures

Items that require students to recall information promote retention and learning—a chief intent
when checking for understanding. By requiring students to fill in a blank within a reading
passage, cloze and maze procedures do just that.

When using these procedures, be sure to use grammatically and semantically consistent
choices for distractors. By eliminating obvious distractors, you can rule out other strategies
students may use—such as knowledge of syntax—to choose the correct answers.

Question-Answer Relationships

Formative assessments can also explore the reasons why students choose correct or incorrect
answers. Question–Answer Relationships (QAR) provides students with a decision-making
framework for locating information in reading passages.

QAR was developed as a means for students to determine whether the relevant information for
each question could be found directly in the text.
1. Right There (text-explicit): Answers to these questions can be located in the text, often in one
sentence.

2. Think and Search (text-explicit): These answers can also be found in the text, but they may be
scattered across several sentences or paragraphs.

3. Author and You (text-implicit): The answer is not directly stated in the text and requires the
reader to formulate an opinion based on the passage (e.g., “The tone of this passage is . . .”).

4. On My Own (text-implicit): The student must use his or her background knowledge to answer
the question (e.g., “Based on your experiences . . .”)

After teaching students about these types of questions and the relationships, they have to text,
and ask students to identify the type of questions they encounter on quizzes and tests that use
reading passages.

CONCLUSION

We have focused on a number of different ways that teachers can check for understanding
while providing instruction.

Checking for understanding is not a summative assessment used for grading or accountability.
Rather, a formative tool that guides instruction and is part of a formative assessment system
that leads to feedback and feed-forward.

We have considered the use of oral language, writing, projects and performances, tests, and
common formative assessments in checking to understand. Each of these approaches has
strengths, and teachers typically use a variety of techniques within each lesson to gauge what
students are learning.