Speaking Engagement: John Mayer, Executive Director
Topic
Are Your Students Learning? Online Formative Assessment is Vital!
Description
This description is being written in May of 2020 before we know if schools will be open for in-person classes in the Fall. I predict that ALL law school courses will be entirely online or have an online component for all students.
What does this have to do with Formative Assessment?
Everything!
It is harder to track student progress and engage them in online settings. Teaching without formative assessment is like flying a plane without any working gauges in the fog. You won't find out how things are going until you try to land and crash. Also, students need and want formative assessment so that they know they are tracking the material in the class. I will use this webinar to talk about some ways to introduce formative assessment in your teaching. As CALI's Executive Director, I will naturally use CALI lessons, LessonLink, and QuizWright as examples, but the lessons apply no matter what tools you use.
To be clear, this is about graded mid-terms exams. Those do provide some level of formative assessment - they can send up a flare if the class is missing important points, but there is a difference between graded and ungraded assessment.
Incorporating more formative assessments will make you a better teacher and wakes up students to their responsibilities as learners. You can only do so much, they have to do the rest. Formative assessment in how.