If used correctly, formative assessment develops an effective cycle of communication between teacher and student. The evidence gathered informs the teacher about an individual’s understanding and abilities and provides the basis for an academic discussion that supports student improvement and learning growth. The teacher and the students must act on the evidence identifying not only accuracy but also uncovering misunderstandings and/or faulty reasoning. Formative assessment bridges instruction and learning. Formative assessment requires feedback. Formative assessment does not end in evaluation.

Task topics take the focus off local content and place it directly on universal thinking skills. Regardless of your state’s standards, task topics can become the center for designing units. PARCC has used this approach in designing its Common Core ELA/Literacy assessment. By using PARCC’s assessment blueprints as a template, any school or teacher can design a standards-based curriculum and write a standards-based assessment. In the test specification documents (accessible here on the PARCC website), PARCC outlines grade-level standards to be assessed through specific task topics. Imagine, teachers, if you adopted similar performance task as units of study! The task could take many forms: speeches, presentations, and/or visual representations. Each of these forms could meet reading, writing, and speaking and listening standards in challenging and engaging ways. Click here to download my grade-by-grade summary of PARCC’s lengthly documents: Standards-based Unit Task Topics.

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Using the F-bomb with the frequency of a comma. Texting or checking the phone while in face-to-face conversation. Responding to a question with a finger. Interrupting a speaker as the first utterance begins to take shape on the lips. These have all become common habits and accepted conventions within today’s conversations. Whether viewing political campaign speeches, nightly sitcoms and dramas, or attempting to engage in a public conversation, similar scenarios play themselves out across populations. Through public tolerance of such displays, our communities tend to encourage rudeness in conversation.

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It seems that yesterday’s talk of the town–Bloom’s—has lost top billing to Webb’s Depth of Knowledge a.k.a., DoK. Unlike Bloom’s Taxonomy which classifies instructional objectives with cognitive behaviors, Webb’s DoK aligns student performance tasks with cognitive rigor, the depth of intellectual involvement. In reality, Bloom’s and Webb’s structures do not work in opposition nor are they necessarily independent. Frankly, they work best when paired. The teacher’s goal in applying DoK to student tasks is to both ensure and support actual engagement of higher-order thinking skills as students work through tasks.

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Image credit courtesy of Flickr: Sandy Roberts “Knowledge” Creative Commons License