Happy Back-to-School Season!

This season we are going to take you through Utah State Board of Education’s 2023 "Formative Assessment Process Toolkit" with the aid of Derivita’s SpotCheck one step at a time. 

Hopefully, armed with both this toolkit and SpotCheck you can create, manage, and deploy formative assessments quickly and easily in your math classroom on a daily basis!

Download the USBE "Formative Assessment Process Toolkit" here:

Check back every Tuesday to see the latest blog post on how to best utilize SpotCheck to support your instructional practices and the creation of digital formative assessments in your daily math classroom. 

Step 2: Identifying Success Criteria

By identifying and articulating to your classroom your success criteria, you’re not only giving yourself clear goals for your lesson plans and instructional practices, but also giving your students clear and attainable indicators that they are progressing and actively learning new material. 

So how does SpotCheck help with identifying and articulating success criteria in the learning classroom?

First thing’s first, we know that success criteria isn’t going to look the same for every student in a course, grade, or a school. 

It may be helpful for teachers or administrators to have general success criteria for a course or grade level at the start of the year to act as a foundation and something to compare individual student success against. For example, students in a Calculus course might be described as successful and ready to progress to the next course once they are able to solve basic integration problems using techniques like substitution and integration by parts. 

But every student, no matter what course they’re placed in, are on their own learning journey and their individual success is probably going to look pretty unique. 

SpotCheck helps identify which students are struggling and which students are ready to progress to the next concept in a class. This helps teachers to group similarly performing students or pair struggling students with already improved students. This ability alone, allows teachers to more clearly identify what success is for each student, a group of students, or maybe even the entire class, on an immediate and daily basis. After identification, they can articulate what that success indicator is to their students and allow for the students to independently understand whether or not they have mastered a concept or need more work on an area. 

SpotCheck can go one step further and help teachers understand when a singular concept is proving difficult and slowing the class’ overall progress. This data can inform the day or week’s lesson planning and instructional practices, but also inform what the goals for the day or the week for an entire class should be. 

The Power of Immediate Data

The immediacy of SpotCheck’s digital formative assessment is where the value is hidden. SpotCheck can show where students are in their learning progression right at the moment, equipping educators with immediate information to individualize their instruction and create attainable learning goals for each and every student. 

How do you clarify your learning intentions in your classroom?

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