Student Responders and their Effect on Formative Assessment and Pedagogy

Black and William’s research made it clear that the effective use of formative assessment is a critical predictor of student learning, informing both the learner and the teacher. As a result, large investments were made in the professional development of teachers so that they would be able to better create and use formative assessment. However, even when teachers had enough understanding to accomplish that, execution proved daunting in practice because of the time required to develop these new more complicated lessons (with ongoing embedded formative assessment) for multiple courses. While it was possible, in theory, to effectively implement formative assessment, it was not practical.

Student Responders proved to be just the technology that was needed to make formative assessment practical. Creating IWB Presentations with embedded Student Response questions has enabled a pedagogy that alternates between short intervals of direct instruction and real-time embedded formative assessment. Not only is the content of the course embedded in each IWB Presentation, so is the pedagogy that is used to teach that content.

Informing Instruction

Example of Formative Assessment through Student Responders

After brief direct instruction on a new topic, formative assessment questions are asked of the class, within the IWB Presentation; students are encouraged to discuss their ideas. When the question is stopped and the class’s answers are displayed on the board, there are three possible outcomes: they are almost all right; they are almost all wrong; there is a mixture of right and wrong answers. Only the teacher knows which is the case in each instance, since the students do not yet know which answer is correct.

If they are all right, the teacher might try one more question, and if the result is equally good, skip the rest of the questions and go to the next topic. If they are all wrong, the teacher would reteach the concept. If there is a mixture, the teacher would ask the students to find someone with a different answer and have each try to convince the other that they are correct. Then, they would re-vote to see if the students have been able to reason to the correct answer, which is the usual outcome. If not, the teacher would explain the correct answer. Then they try again, repeating this with multiple questions until the vast majority is answering correctly on at least two questions in a row.