Customer Reviews

25 Quick Formative Assessments for a Differentiated Classroom: Easy, Low-Prep Assessments That Help You Pinpoint Students' Needs and Reach All Learners

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This book is simply marvelous. If you are interested in assessing your students in a variety of ways- whether or not you consider your classroom "differentiated"- this book is for you. Why this book is such a great resource:

1) The assessments are easy to understand and implement. If you don't have the time to modify them to your needs, you can copy the corresponding pages directly out of the book or off the CD to hand out to your students.

2) The assessments can easily be adapted to any content area and any grade level. The book says it's for 3-8, but many can be used as-is or with slight modifications for high school.

3)The information is split into four sections, which each section focusing on a specific type of learner- audio, visual, etc. You could either rotate through the types of assessments to help students find their strengths and build their weaknesses, or you could use them to provide students with options when it comes to homework ideas.

4) If you use tiering in your classroom, many of the assessments provide tips for modifying them with more support (for struggling learners) or making them more challenging (for more advanced learners).

5) Many of the assessments also have easy and practical tips for tying technology into them.

This book is so user-friendly, to the point, helpful, and best of all, inexpensive. I would highly, highly recommend it!

Formative assessments should be quick, on-the-spot, non-graded assessments of whether the kids are "getting it". Most of the assessments in this book are useful, but (in my mind) much more likely to be used as summative (or end-of-unit) assessments. Perhaps these assignments are put together as the unit progresses - but they do not seem to be for the purpose of checking comprehension. Rather, the intention often is to display (posters, etc) what the students have learned. Yes, this could be a check of comprehension, but the formality of the product makes it seem more than that. Also, you need a big paper budget if you have 125 students daily! Each assessment for each student (or student group) seems to require a full sheet (if you follow the author's templates). And, if a group is doing the assessment, how can the teacher be certain that each student is on track?

I am teaching undergraduate students of education in a university. My courses are Assessment and Evaluation and Classroom Teaching and Management. Both of these courses stress the importance of formative FEEDBACK and its positive effect in student learning and in teacher planning. This book has a variety of very clever, quick directions and templates to use with learners from grades 3-8 and suggests what subjects to apply them to. I believe many of the ideas can be adapted to high school, as well. I shared a couple of the ideas with my students and suggested they buy the book someday to help make themselves a most effective teacher. The price here at Amazon is excellent!!JUDY

I will try to make my review as complete as possible.
My district is encouraging teachers to use formative assessments in class. There are a lot of articles on the subject, but it is hard to find formative assessment assignments. This book is a great start. I teach foreign language, and am able to adapt most of these 25 examples to my classes. Judith Dodge explains gives step-by-step directions, how to apply the formative assessment, and helpful tips, such for tiering, and on occasion, showing how to use the assessment in other subjects. I like the templates that are included. I have not looked at the DVD that shows the assessments in action, but will do so soon. There is also a large bibliography that may help teachers look further into formative assessments. I personally want a wide array of activities so I keep the assessments fresh and interesting.
My hint is to look for formative assessments for other subjects. Science has books with activities.
All in all, a very good place to start for formative assessments.
p.s. I would love to see a second book by Judith Dodge on this topic. More formative assessments please!

I ordered the Scholastic book, 25 Quick Formative Assessments for a Differentiated Classroom to use with my middle school geography students. The book is for grades 3-8.

This assessment/teacher idea book is excellent. It is easy to follow and very simple to implement. As soon as I rec'vd it, I put several of the formative assessment tools to work in my sixth grade geography classes.

I especially like the cooperative group activities. They have a real-world component that gives students an opportunity to work in collaborative groups. The activities have a critical thinking component built into them.

The title is absolutely correct. This is an easy and very low-prep assessment tool. The activities are so low prep, you can even use them in your Sub emergency plans. You don't necessarily have to use them for assessment. They are excellent for integration into regular daily activities.

However, when using for Subs, be sure to hold students accountable for their work as they will be working in cooperative groups. This will reduce socializing when a Sub is present.

The activities are creative, and they can be adjusted for use with several grade levels. The activities are also flexible, and can be used with a significant number of concepts.

The activities can be modified for use with gifted students, exceptional education students, and regular education students.

I divided students into groups of 3 or 4, distributed a class set copy of the handout 'Headline News! Summary (p. 82-85), distributed a class set copy of a current georgraphy based news article (weather disaster in Japan, Haiti, and Northern U.S., etc.), assigned students a group number, and assigned students to a section of the classroom. I modeled and used direct instruction.

I taped large chart paper on the walls around the classroom, and each group had to create the form on the chart paper, fill in the form, and illustrate.

This activity assessed their ability to follow directions, determine the main idea, seek out facts, use critical thinking skills, plan, collaborate, question, predict, summarize, read in the content area, and use technology.

I'm a high school science teacher and know that I can use several of the activities in this book.

I got this book since the focus of our professional development through the district is formative assessments. The book is a typical Scholastic book--full of worksheets that you can use right away in your classroom. Most of the assessments ask the students to do enough that you can actually see what they know--this book isn't for quick "summarize in the five minutes before lunch" type assessements. What moves this book above the usual Scholastic offering is the background research information on how the activity supports student learning and the "Step-by-Step" that precedes the activities so you can easily use the worksheet. The "Tips for Tiering" are less helpful--they're pretty much what most teachers have figured out to do already like giving struggling readers sentence starters and having advanced students do more work or a longer project based on the worksheet. The book comes with a CD that promises further glories and variations on the templates, but the one included with my book was completely blank. I contacted Scholastic to get a replacement since I'd already marked up the book before I ran the CD, but they refused to do anything since I hadn't bought directly from them (for almost ten dollars more--really not worth that price even with a working CD!). I'd still recommend the book as a starting place for formative assessments, but be aware that, depending their quality control, the CD maybe only be good as a rescue mirror. If you're pretty versed in formative assessements, I'd skip this book.

Judy Dodge is a gifted educator/staff developer/author who has, once again, compiled an outstanding resource filled with highly appealing, user friendly formative assessments. Having left teaching to enter the administrative "venue" 10 years ago, I find myself longing for my own inclusive middle school language arts classes to "experiment" with implementation! However, in the absence of such, my adminstrative team has constructed staff development for our teachers - that focuses on Judy's fine work.
BLF, North Merrick, New York

I am a math teacher and was looking forward to different ideas to implement quick formative assessments in my classroom! I can only use about 3 of the 25 .... a little bit disappointed! I would also use these in an elementary/6th grade setting .... not sure my 8th graders will buy into some of the assessments in the book.

Great resource book, just make copies and distribute to students. Helps differentiate worksheet template for all learners. Emergent readers and writers will benefit from resources in this book by drawing pictures to writing essays.