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This month's column focuses on technology tools that NSTA e-mail listserv members use for formative assessment. Formative assessment is information that educators can use to improve teaching and learning. According to Page Keeley, author of Science Formative Assessment: 75 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning, the main purpose of formative assessment is to "improve student learning" by providing learning opportunities through informed and "carefully designed" instruction (2008, p. 5). Technology tools can help teachers quickly collect and make sense of the formative assessment data, which leads to more purposeful planning in instruction.
Digital tools that make the grade
A teacher from the NSTA pedagogy listserv asked: "I am looking for an electronic formative assessment system. I would like it to be online, self-scoring, and able to provide students with [data-based] feedback. Any suggestions?"
Flickers and Socrative are two highly rated technology tools that are often shared on the NSTA email listservs (see Resources).
Flickers
Flickers is a free assessment tool that allows teachers to "collect real-time formative assessment data without the need for student devices" (see Resources). It is a low-tech response system that requires only a teacher's mobile device and QR codes. A QR code is a machine-readable code composed of black-and-white squares. They store URLs and other information, which are read by the camera on a mobile device.
With Flickers, students are assigned their own printed QR code, which they rotate in one of four directions to indicate their answers to multiple-choice or true-or-false questions. The teacher projects the question on the board, turns on the Flickers mobile app, and scans the room for QR codes. Individual QR codes are picked up by the mobile device, and student names and responses are projected on the board. Student results for each question are tabulated as a bar graph and can be saved as reports and scoresheets. These records can be accessed on the website and broken down to track individual student performance (see Figures 1 and 2).
An NSTA TechEd listserv member wrote: "Plickers [is] great for quick warm-ups and checks for understanding." Flickers can be used for surveys to assess prior knowledge at the start of a unit, for administering embedded questions throughout lectures and activities as ongoing formative assessment, and...