Formative Assessment in Kindergarten

Formative assessment can be challenging especially for the younger grades. Kindergarten is usually the first time kids are in school and they need to be assessed appropriately. The teacher cannot expect the students to come to school reading and writing, while some might be able to, most students cannot. The teacher should assess the students right away on what they know and teach students all year to reach a goal and then be assessed again to see if they reached that goal.

            There are so many ways to assess students in the classroom. There is no one way to assess students. There are so many great tools to help teachers assess their students. With upper grades the teacher can give their students more tools to assess them with, but with kindergarten there are not as many tools. There are still some great ways to use formative assessment in the classroom.

In my research I found a school's plan for assessing kindergarteners. It is a 78 page packet that explains what assessing, evaluating, and reporting student's work. The school has laid out what they expect the teachers to do to get the most valuable information about the student's learning. This is the whole idea of formative assessment. It is the way teachers find out how much the students learned from a lesson.

    Formative assessment is not the only kind of assessment there is. There are other kinds such as diagnostic assessment and summative assessment.

    Formative assessments are done everyday in school. Standardized tests are a big assessment that most people think of when they think of assessing students but they are not given in kindergarten. Teachers need to have something to assess the students on. There are two things that help teachers know what to assess students are. The first is the national standards for kindergarten and then the state standards. In North Carolina they use the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. All teachers in North Carolina need to follow these standards and make sure their students learn what they need to.

    There are many important tools for formative assessment. Such tools can be observation, interaction, and listening. These are all tools that the teacher and the student can use to get the most out of formative assessment. The teacher can observe the student and take notes about their progress. The teacher and student can interact with each other which gives the teacher a better idea of how the student is doing, and also how the student thinks they are doing. It is important for the student to be a part of their own learning. And last is listening. The teacher should be listening to the student and really understanding what they are thinking and why they are thinking that.



   Formative assessment is very important in all grades, and can be made into more student and teacher friendly activities other than standardized tests!