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Online Formative Assessments Providing Critical Information to Teachers & Administrators

Posted: Sunday, March 22, 2009

by Josh Leitz
Backbone Communications

A self reflective process that intends to promote student attainment is one of the best ways that you can describe the concept of online formative assessments. It is the process between a teacher and student in order to enhance, recognize and respond to learning. As well as having a positive effect upon student learning it also aims to help students take control of their own learning.

The uses of online formative assessments are most prevalent and popular in any education setting. However, even though the use of online formative assessments have a sound theoretical basis it has been said that some of the data needed to establish their educational benefits are lacking. This may be the case but I thoroughly believe that students are given a much better chance of success when they are presented with the use of online formative assessments. Think about it this way if students are presented with practice online exam questions then those who do these practice exam questions voluntarily go on to perform better in the actual exam as oppose to those students who did not utilize the opportunity of taking these practice exam questions.

This is what the online formative assessment is all about. It is designed to help students perform to the best of their ability and to make sure they are receiving and taking advantage of all the help that is being made available to them. The main ways that the online formative assessment is designed to help students is it makes them more motivated to learn by giving them more option of ways to learn. It also allows them to take responsibility for their own learning and allows students to learn valuable lifelong skills such as self evaluation, self assessment and goal setting.

The use of online formation assessment in education doesn't however just benefit the students but it also benefits teachers as well in the following ways:

They are able to determine what standards students already know and to what degree they know it
It allows teacher to decide what modifications or changes, if any, that they need to make so all students can succeed in instruction and assessments
Helps them to create lessons and/or activities that are most appropriate to students needs. These can either be taught in groups or on an individual basis
It allows teachers to inform students about their current progress in order to help them set goals for improvement

Online formative assessment is something that should be implemented into all forms of education in order to help it function more efficiently. All of the above demonstrate just how much the online formative assessment can benefit everyone involved in education. After all education should be presented in the most valuable way possible and if online formative assessments assist in this then it is defiantly something that can't be ignored.

All education institutions should at least trial the idea of online formative assessment and all students should make use of this help wherever possible for the best results guaranteed.

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