Spooky Season Continues!

Derivita is here to take you through Utah State Board of Education’s 2023 "Formative Assessment Process Toolkit" with the aid of Derivita’s SpotCheck one step at a time. 

Hopefully, armed with both this toolkit and SpotCheck you can create, manage, and deploy formative assessments quickly and easily in your math classroom on a daily basis!

Download the USBE "Formative Assessment Process Toolkit" here:

Check back on Derivita's Blog Tuesdays to see the latest blog post on how to best utilize SpotCheck to support your instructional practices and the creation of digital formative assessments in your daily math classroom. 

Step 4: Engaging in self-assessment and peer feedback 

The toolkit emphasizes; “When students interact with the results of their formative assessments, they can make choices about how to move forward in their learning”. 

SpotCheck offers students to evaluate their own work and that of their peers immediately after they reach their individual solutions. 

Provide Examples and Worked-Out Solutions

However, you choose to conduct your lessons with the support of SpotCheck, we encourage you to end that period of your lesson with step-by-step instructions on how you, as the instructor, work through the given problem. This can be offered after individual work and self-evaluation or peer-review work in groups on the same problem. 

This step-by-step instruction can showcase:

• a new method of solving the given problem,
• an opportunity for students to compare each of their steps next to those of the instructor
• a way to initiate discussion within the classroom,
• and a clear set of meaningful goals you want your students to hit in order to fully master the given concept.

Support Peer-Review Tasks

SpotCheck is an easy and convenient way to initiate student discourse, peer-review, and group work. The entire class can work together or work in small groups to work through the problem. Teachers can even break down a single difficult problem into multiple steps and calibrate SpotCheck to ask custom questions about each step. Students can ask each other how they worked through each step and wonder why their peers thought differently. 

Create Opportunities for Individual Review

After you throw your SpotCheck question up on the board for the class to see, you have the opportunity to give them independent time to work on their problem. Once their responses have been submitted and you have access to a real-time visual of which students got the correct solution, which students got it incorrect but all arrived at the same answer, which students got an incorrect answer that was unlike other students’ responses, and which students simply didn’t respond. This part of the process is automatic. 

You also have the ability to broadcast all the other students’ responses with indicators of which ones were correct. 

This allows your students to take ownership of their responses and their thought processes and help them understand the “why” of how they and their peers arrived at the solution - with little to no interference from you, the teacher. 

How do you elicit student engagement and analyze student thought in your classroom?

Let us know in our FaceBook Derivita User Community by clicking below