Pedagogy Seminar: Formative Feedback and Assessment

When planning and teaching a lesson, one critical step is taking stock of what students have actually learned. Formative assessment and feedback (as opposed to “summative assessment”) is regular, low-stakes opportunities for both the instructor and the students to measure current student understanding. We’ll spend some time discussing why this feedback process is so important as well as the many ways to get this information in the course of a normal class. We’ll discuss generic questions, as well as specific questions, using the concept of a derivative to ground our brainstorming.