Touch Base with Your Online Students Using Formative Assessment
Three Surveying Tools to Help You Better Understand Your Online Students
Wow! It has been a wild past few weeks, hasn’t it? With all the whirlwind events that have been happening across our nation and particularly in our education system, do you feel like you have lost touch with your students?
This Instructional Insight was originally going to be all about formative assessment and how to effectively use it to monitor your students’ learning progress. With so many instructors working so hard to get their courses online, we have shifted our focus slightly. In this Insight, will now be focused on how you can use formative assessment type tools to reach out and check on how your students are doing during this transition to learning online.
You can use formative assessment tools to check on how your students are doing during this transition to learning online
With so many in-person courses now online, it can be easy to feel like it has lost some of the human element. However, there are so many ways to make online teaching and learning extremely personal. Check out 6 Tips to Move Your In-Person Course Online During the Coronavirus to find ideas and tool recommendations to aid you in your online transition.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links and I could earn a small commission at no additional cost to you should you make a purchase using them. All recommendations are based on my personal experience.
Table of Contents
The Power of Formative Assessment Online
Assessment is an essential part of the learning process both online and in-person. There are two key assessment types. Explore the definitions of formative and summative assessment below:
Formative assessment is conducted throughout the learning process to monitor student progress towards achieving a learning objective. When done correctly, it can also foster student learning by helping students identify their strengths and weaknesses. Once a student and an instructor understand what are areas of learning weakness, those weaknesses can be addressed and overcome.
Summative assessment is administered once a learning process is complete. This can range from a single course or an entire curriculum. This assessment serves as a final and complete evaluation of the students’ achievement of a learning objective. Ideally, the summative assessment is the sum of all the smaller formative assessments.
We mention how vital formative assessment can be to our students during the learning process. Still, it can also be a powerful tool to get an accurate read on how your students are doing during this transition. We love the definition of formative assessment above because it emphasizes assessing the students during the learning process; this can mean so many things!
Yes, it is essential to evaluate students on the academic aspects of the learning process, but it can also mean assessing the physiological and emotional aspects of the learning process.
During this crazy time, more than ever, it is so crucial that you take the time to get to reacquainted with your students as they are now your online students. How are they handling now having to learn online? What resources do they have available to them? Do they know how to contact you or where to go to find their course materials?
When you are teaching in-person, it is easy to pick up on social cues that clue you in on how your students are doing. In the online format, those cues are no longer easily observed. That is when formative assessment can come into play. Send out a quick survey to see how your students are doing, and this can provide you with valuable insight into how your instruction is going and if anything needs to be adjusted.
Do not forget, one of the reasons for conducting a formative assessment is to use the data to help you better adjust your instruction to meet the needs of your students. If your students are not responding well to an aspect of your online instructor, take their feedback, and adjust! Who knows, they could give you some great ideas for what works well in online teaching!
Examples of Formative Assessment Using Three Popular Online Surveying Tools
To give you a clearer idea of how to use a formative type assessment to evaluate how your students are doing with the transition to online learning, we have made a few examples for you to check out!
Click the links below to explore the different online assessment tools great for formative assessments. All the examples below ask similar questions; they are just presented slightly differently among the tools.
Check In With Your Students Today
Now it is time to take action and send out a quick survey out to your students to see how they are doing!
Want a copy of the surveys above? Great, we are thrilled to share what we have created in hopes of saving you time. Please submit your email address below, and we will send you links to copy the surveys we have created.
Once you have received your copy of the surveys and sent one out to your students, give us a shout-out on our Facebook page, letting us know it was helpful!
Once you have received your copy of the surveys and sent one out to your students, give us a shoutout on our Facebook page, letting us know it was helpful.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links and I could earn a small commission at no additional cost to you should you make a purchase using them. All recommendations are based on my personal experience.
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