Creative Formal Assessments Students are capable of demonstrating knowledge and mastery of concepts in many ways. In addition to traditional formal assessments like tests, quizzes, and exit tickets, my kids complete lots of projects and presentations. This reduces the pressure of having to show everything you know on a single test or quiz.
This is an example of a finished project which included a presentation in front of the class on different types of symbiotic relationships.
Here we have an assessment rubric for a project and presentation about environmental sustainability and improving our local community.
Here students demonstrated mastery of macromolecules by identifying foods that belong in each category, drawing the molecular structure of the building blocks for each macromolecule, and recalling the mechanism by which monomers come together and separate.
Traditional Formal Assessments These are great for collecting and analyzing data to see which objectives students have mastered, which objectives need to be revisited, and to measure student growth.
Collecting and Analyzing Data
Using ZipGrade for formal assessments cuts the grading time in half since it does the work for me.
I simply take a picture of each students' test or quiz answer sheet with the ZipGrade app.
Here we have an item analysis for questions 1-42 from a midterm exam. I can see what percentage and the number of students answered each question correctly.
Competition Between Classes
First Place (highest class average)
Second Place
Third Place
Informal Assessments These informal checks for understanding can take a variety of forms in my classroom. The most common are Bell Ringers at the start of class, thumbs up (you agree)/thumbs down (you disagree), or Who am I/What am I.
This is a bell ringer from our unit on protecting the environment. At the start of each class students answer a question based on what we learned the previous day.
This should be a thumbs down. A 1:2:1 genotypic ratio would mean 1BB, 2Bb, and 1bb. The outcome of this monohybrid cross is 2BB and 2Bb.
This activity is nice to do as a review in groups of 3 students. Correct answer: Gregor Mendel