The Power of Formative Assessment: An Interview With Beth Kobett

Beth Kobett

Beth Kobett is the dean of the School of Education at Stevenson University near Baltimore, Maryland, where she educates future teachers. Beth also works with educators to improve their teaching practice and with schools to implement strengths-based mathematics teaching and formative assessment. She has co-authored a number of books on rich math tasks for younger students.

MARIAN: A lot of teachers know that formative assessment is important, but they don’t know exactly what the big messages are. What would you say is most important about formative assessment for a teacher? Why does it matter, and what should they not worry too much about?

BETH: The first thing is that formative assessment allows us to make good instructional decisions. It’s the moment-to-moment feedback that you might be giving an entire class, an individual student, or a small group of students that really is moving students’ thinking and learning forward.

For example, if my students are engaged in a math task, and I’m noticing that one or two are struggling, I’m receiving feedback from those students, which is part of the formative assessment process. I’ll go to the students, and instead of saying, “Here’s what you need to do,” I’ll collect information by asking good questions or asking them to show me a model about their thinking, and then I’ll use that information right then and there.

That’s the power of formative assessment feedback. We give them either something to do—another question—or something to think about to move that learning forward. It’s those just-in-time conversations and teacher decisions that make formative assessment so powerful.

I think one of the pitfalls of formative assessment is to think only about collecting something at the end of the lesson to help us decide what to teach the next day. That isn’t the most powerful point. The powerful point is all the feedback that we’re receiving and giving to students during the lesson.

MARIAN: Teachers tell me that if they don’t write the information down, it really doesn’t count. And there’s no way they could write things down about everybody. What do you say to your student teachers if they bring this up?

BETH: We legitimize the information they’re seeing. We give them a clipboard and tell them they don’t need to collect information on every student, every day. If they have 25 students, for example, they could do 5 a day. We tell them to collect information about models their students are using, representations, interesting questions students might have, or something students shared when they were sharing their thinking. That is all valuable information that can then be conveyed to families and used in our planning.

For example, when I’m teaching fractions, I might notice that students are having a difficult time plotting numbers on a number line. I’m going to go around and ask questions about that, collect data about that, and then make some different instructional decisions based on what I’m seeing.

I also use this method with my pre-service students so that I have this evidence and can then have a conference with them and say, “I noticed you did this and this. This is really interesting. Here’s how you’re progressing. Here’s how you’re thinking about that. Next time, I’d like you to be thinking about this.” Students absolutely love it.

Another spectacular aspect of formative assessment is interviewing. I’m not suggesting we interview every student, every day. But what about every quarter or once a month? We found that our young students couldn’t wait to be interviewed, and we were curious about that. They didn’t find it intimidating; they found it lovely and joyous. It turns out they just love being heard. The eye contact, the sitting together—it’s powerful for them.

MARIAN: Does formative assessment apply to math practices? How do we help teachers see that not only are we assessing whether students can create an equivalent fraction, but we’re also assessing their habits?

BETH: Absolutely. I think when we assess their habits, then we start to have conversations about those habits, and students will start to see the value in that. If we only have the conversation about whether their answer is right or wrong, that’s not particularly useful feedback. Whether it’s right or wrong, while that’s interesting, we need to see the evidence so that we can understand students’ reasoning.

So, we’re going to have a conversation where I ask a student to throw down some ideas and write a sentence or two about the reasoning behind their answer. How did they think about that equivalent fraction? What did they do? And then students start to see the value in that.

It’s about the way we ask the question and the information we’re trying to collect. Yes, content is important, but it’s not that helpful without knowing more about how students are thinking about the content. We really can’t direct them next if we don’t understand more about where they’re coming from. We’ve all had students get things right, and then when we probe a little, we see they were getting it right, but they didn’t fully understand the concept.

MARIAN: Have your ideas about formative assessment changed or been refined over time?

BETH: I would say “refined” is a great word for it. Initially, we were trying to get the techniques down—interviewing, observing, legitimizing observations. A teacher might do some amazing observations and think, “Oh, that’s not important.” Actually, it’s really important. The refining has become for me and my colleagues Skip Fennell and Jon Wray about really paying attention to the feedback so that we can give even better feedback to students. We’ve really been studying the feedback cycle.

This, coupled with my work with Karen Karp in strengths-based teaching and learning, is looking at helping students acknowledge the strengths in the work that they’re producing and being able to leverage those strengths. We tend to home in on all the things students are doing wrong, but in every piece of work, there’s usually something right. And students are walking away with this sort of black and white thinking that “I got it wrong and have to start over” instead of “I created a number line and labelled the number line. Now what do I need? I need to get some manipulatives to help me out.”

We’re thinking about very specific, intentional feedback, and that is grounded in the research as well—students need to know what they’re doing right as well as where they need to move forward.

MARIAN: Feedback often is about right or wrong, and you’re encouraging it to be about other things. Can you give us another example?

BETH: I think this will resonate with a lot of teachers—that situation where students are working on a task, and they just write an answer but don’t show how they got there. There’s nothing to even have a conversation about. So, in that feedback cycle, while writing an answer is great, students really need to be thinking about how they got there because when they get into more difficult mathematics in later years, this work will support them because they will understand their own thinking.

So, it’s not just about me understanding a student’s thinking. It’s about that student understanding their own thinking. We spend a lot of time helping students think about their own processes and their own approach to mathematics. I think students who are very competent at math tend to push back a little bit in thinking about those explanations.

MARIAN: Teachers often tell me that when they ask a student to explain a situation, the student says, “Well, I just know.” Do you think we should be asking students a question if it’s something they can do right away? Maybe we should be giving them questions that we know they can’t do right away.

BETH: I had a pivotal moment a long time ago when I was teaching. I was going into different second-grade classrooms, presenting a task where I was asking students to think about multiple ways to solve a two-digit subtraction problem. I said, “Here are some manipulatives. Choose whichever ones you want to show how to solve it.” There were two problems where the subtraction required regrouping, which the students had not done yet, so the idea was for them to think about it.

One student drew himself, and he drew thought bubbles. In the thought bubbles, he wrote the answers. He brought this up to his teacher, and she said, “No, that’s not what I want.” I said, “Hold on a second. He’s communicating something to us.” Then I said to him, “This is so interesting. Can you do this in your head?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Let’s see if we can think of a subtraction problem that you can’t do in your head.”

His eyes lit up, and he said to me, “I’ve been trying to tell people that I can do this in my head, but no one would listen.” So, I completely agree with you. I don’t think we should force someone to say how they subtract 6 – 4 if they already know how to do that.

MARIAN: That was great feedback. You’ve written some resources about rich tasks. What do you think makes a task rich?

BETH: A rich task is something that’s a little juicy; it’s a little messy. It provides opportunities for students to use multiple strategies or create solution pathways that are different from one another. It might have one answer, but there might be many ways to get there, or it might have multiple solutions. So, it’s about creating an opportunity for students to think.

MARIAN: Is it easier to create rich tasks for older kids or younger kids?

BETH: At first, it was easier for me to create rich tasks for middle school and intermediate students. But now, I’m loving what I see in the primary grades with rich tasks. It’s great because of their excitement but also because of the incredible creativity that young children bring to mathematics. I think that with young children, there’s no fear—they just get in there and figure it out.

MARIAN: What might be a rich task for kindergarten students?

BETH: I did this one recently with kindergarten students. It’s the idea of giving them a task around non-standard measurements: “A frog did 6 hops across a lily pad. How big were the hops?” The first time I taught a version of this lesson, the teacher said, “I don’t know about this, Beth. This is terrifying.” I said, “I don’t know either. Let’s just try it and see what happens.” So, the kids had to create the unit of the hop. They tried different tools and thought about it, and immediately they started thinking about the idea of what would be too big and too small. They were using all that beautiful vocabulary that we want them to use.

MARIAN: That’s fantastic. What about a rich task for Grade 4 or 5? What would that sound like?

BETH: Our authors Delise Andrews and Sorsha Mulroe just came up with this beautiful task. We ended up trying this one out, and it was really exciting. It’s a fifth-grade task, and it’s called the inkblot. There are cards with decimals, large and small, and whole numbers. We tell students an accident happened that caused an inkblot on there, and they have to figure out the order of these numbers without knowing all of the information.

MARIAN: So, you’re saying that a rich task could be contextual but doesn’t have to be.

BETH: Yes. I think there’s a belief that if it’s not contextual, then it’s not a rich task, but that’s not true. We can get into just the math of it and have it be super cool. But we want students to see all those ways that math can be.

If it’s a real-world task, what’s “real world” to a kindergartner? We need it to be interesting. It can be fanciful and magical because that’s the lives of children. We need to make sure that we’re accessing the life of a child. We often do these tasks that are real world to adults but not to children.

MARIAN: One of the things I’ve heard you say is “Let’s try.” How do we convince teachers that it’s safe to say to themselves, “Let’s try”?

BETH: I’ll be super vulnerable and say that every lesson I’ve ever taught has not been magical or spectacular. I don’t hit it out of the ballpark every time, because I am trying new things. But I learn so much when I take risks in the classroom—about students and what they can do, about myself, and about the tasks that I’m trying.

I think we have to be willing to be vulnerable. At Stevenson University, we’re using something called the Strength-Based Observation, where we’re just focusing on the strengths of these initial lessons that our student teachers are trying, and we don’t give them any deficit feedback. And they’re like, “Tell me, tell me.”

I say, “This isn’t about me criticizing you and giving you a list of 85 things you need to change.” We’re not looking for them to fail. We’re looking for the risks that they’re willing to take. And we’re just saying, “That is wonderful. Keep going.” So, the creativity and risk taking are skyrocketing, and it’s just amazing. They feel safe to take those risks because we’re not criticizing them.

MARIAN: That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, Beth.

BETH: Thank you, Marian.