Informal Assessments
Informal Assessments
Informal assessments represent alternatives to the traditional, strictly structured assessment approaches employed in educational settings to evaluate students' learning accurately in a more friendly, relaxed, and flexible environment. They are crucial for teachers since they provide immediate feedback, thereby informing decisions on the need for changes in their strategies of instruction to meet the needs of individual learners effectively.
What are some examples of informal assessments?
Informal assessments can be observations, class discussions, quizzes, peer reviews, and anecdotal records. A good example would be a teacher that applies a rapid exit ticket at the end of a lesson to identify students' understanding of the material that was studied, which then gives a chance for real-time adjustments of the following lessons.
How do informal assessments differ from formal assessments?
Informal assessments are no formal and rigid at all, their main focus is the learning process and the use of daily classroom activities instead of standardized testing. Nevertheless, in opposite to the informal assessments, the formal assessments, such as the standardized test or final exams, are strict, often time-limited, and are meant to quantify the student's performance compared to the employment of a certain set of criteria.
What are the benefits of using informal assessments in the classroom?
Informal assessments offer various advantages such as the freedom to measure student progress, the possibility of improvised instruction, and a fuller picture of student learning styles and needs. For instance, by conducting informal assessments frequently, a teacher can perceive whether some students may need extra help with particular subjects and adapt their teaching strategies respectively.
How can teachers effectively implement informal assessments?
One effective way for teachers to do informal assessments is to place them in the middle of daily activities, for example, by questioning techniques in class discussions or use a quick-formative-assessment like thumbs-up/thumbs-down to assess the understanding. Also, the keeping of a reflective journal where the teacher writes about the interactions with the students and their performance can serve as a tool to monitor their progress and come up with better teaching strategies for the future.