More support for your "Formative Assessment Process Toolkit"

We're here 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.  We have finally reached the end of our series with "Step 6: Collaboration"!

Hopefully, now that you are armed with both this toolkit, SpotCheck, and this blog series, you can now 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:

Step 6: Collaboration

Step 6 in the formative assessment toolkit says that collaboration is "the key to building a classroom culture in which educators

and students are partners in learning".

SpotCheck offers students a chance to engage with the material in the classroom, work with their peers on effective group practice work, become an active member of the community built in your classroom, and master the given concepts through repetition and increased interest.

Derivita has two "best practices" when creating these collaborative formative assessments. Things that you can implement in your own mindset that can influence the mindset of your students and create a more effective learning environment.

1. Encourage Your Student's Partnership

Collaborative formative assessments within the classroom can remind your students that their learning journey is not one that you, as the teacher, are spearheading alone. They have an active role to play when it comes to becoming a highly-skilled math knight. Without their participation and engagement, they will remain a math squire (see what we did there?).

With that being said teachers need to create these opportunities for collaborative formative assessments. For example, teachers could create a SpotCheck assignment that they work on with the entire class curated from missed questions on a previous homework assignment or quiz. This will show students that their mentor understands where they, as individuals or as a class, need more instruction or repetitive review and is willing to work on it with them. Teachers could also invite collaboration by taking a poll of what questions or concepts require additional review for their students. By a simple voting system, teachers can weed out which concepts the majority of their students and understand and which concepts students are struggling with. This lets students' take ownership of the learning journey and have a voice in their instruction. Derivita users and math teachers will already have access to the results and reports from the assignment or quiz or exam in question and can see where the minority of students are struggling and address those separately.

This instructional approach to formative assessment will remind students that you are here for them and want them to succeed. You are partners on this quest for mathematical mastery and will see the best results when working together.

2. Create a Strong Community Within Class

Creating a sense of "belonging" or community within the classroom can be harder than it sounds. But creating quality opportunities for every one of your students to engage with the content, their peers, and you, the teacher is a great place to start. If teachers ask the students to work in groups on a single problem and have one representative from each group approach the board to display the solution that that group has come up with - well the only evidence of understanding you have is what is written on that board by that representative. Teacher can't know if each of the groups, wholly, collaborated and found that solution together or if there was one kid in the group who just nodded along while the "smart" kid in the group did all the work. 

Instead, SpotCheck can deploy a question to every single student at the same time. Every student gets the chance to collaborate with their peers and work out a solution with guidance from each other or find their inner math genius and solve it themselves. With the submitted answers displayed anonymously, no one gets called or feels wrong or "dumb" for getting the wrong answer. In fact, they will see that some of their peers thought the same thing!

Instances where you can get every single student to participate and engage with your content is a step in the right direction. They will feel more confident in themselves and with each other.

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress,

and working together is success.”

- Henry Ford. 

How do you create a "community" within your classroom?

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