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Evaluate 1 - Formative Assessments

Artifact: Create a formative assessment related to a learning standard. Post a link to the assessment or activity and standard in your blog. Explain the purpose of the assessment.

Answer: How does your assessment provide students multiple opportunities to demonstrate understanding, practice concepts or self-check progress? How does the assessment allow you to assess student readiness for course content? How do the results of the assessment change your teaching plans or method of delivery?

The assessment described in this post is a quiz over Mendel's laws of inheritance. The standard for this segment is Georgia's Biology Standard of Excellence SB3:

SB3. Obtain, evaluate, and communicate information to analyze how biological traits are passed on to successive generations.
a. Use Mendel’s laws (segregation and independent assortment) to ask questions and define problems that explain the role of meiosis in reproductive variability.

After reviewing a module and some required reading, my blended biology classes completed the quiz below (View quiz in a separate window). The purpose of the assessment below was to assess students' understanding of Mendelian genetics (dominant vs recessive, genotype vs phenotype, and Mendel's laws). This was one of several formative activities, include interactives, vocabulary practice, and questioning during synchronous instruction.



The quiz includes selected response and free response questions to provide learners a few different means of demonstrate understanding. Other than the free response questions, students' responses are auto-scored and they receive immediate feedback to self-assess.

I've designed the Google Form to provide written feedback on each question. The student will see this feedback when they click View Score. The feedback is based on whether they got the question right or wrong. Correct answers receive praise and reinforcement. Incorrect answers receive specific feedback on what the correct answer is, along with links to videos, interactives, or terminology practice (like Quizlet) for them to review in their remediation on the content. A screenshot of this has been provided below, but you can also view a live example of quiz feedback at the link here.


Because Mendel's laws will be such an important concept for the content that follows, this assessment will be very important to assessing the students' readiness to move forward. While the feedback illustrated above gives students' immediate feedback on what they have missed individually, I also make sure to review the data for the classes as a whole to identify learning gaps or any areas that we may not have covered sufficiently. If/as these needs present themselves, we will adjust the pacing and sequence to reteach the content and address misconceptions OR if the instructional process seems to the be the issue, we redeliver the content in the new way.

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