Easy Formative Assessment Ideas for Spanish Class

¡Hola profes!  Did you know that, on average, teachers make more on-the-spot decisions per minute than brain surgeons?  At first, that sounds crazy, right?  But, when we really stop to think about it, we are CONSTANTLY asking ourselves questions – are students ready to move on to something new, or do they need more practice with a certain concept?  Are they struggling with one particular aspect of the lesson, and could use extra reinforcement?  Would reteaching the lesson benefit the majority of students?

Of course, we need to collect data on students’ progress before we can make the best decision possible.  Without the data, how will we gauge our students’ understanding of the lesson material?  Logically, this makes complete and total sense.  Logistically, however…could be another story.  Collecting and assessing work from all of our students on a daily basis can be a daunting, if not a downright impossible, task.  I remember being a first-year teacher and spending all of my evenings and weekends assessing every bit of my students’ work to understand their progress and current levels of understanding.  It’s what I thought I had to do.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this story – my method of gathering formative assessment data was unsustainable.  Fortunately, I found something that DID work for me, and I wanted to share it with you, in case you are struggling to both collect formative assessment data and save your sanity.

My advice, profes, is to take a snapshot of what students can do.  Have them answer 1-3 questions, or respond to a short prompt in 2-3 sentences.  If you target deliberate content knowledge and/or skills with the questions and prompts that you give, you can gather just as much information as if you looked at a whole page of questions or a page-long composition!  

So, what are some activities you can use to get these snapshots of students’ understanding?  Here are some of my favorites:

#1 Task Cards

Task cards are fantastic for formatively assessing students because each card holds 1-2 questions – the perfect number to get the data that you need without requiring you to spend hours looking through student responses!  There are several ways you could use task cards as formative assessment tools in your classroom:

• When you are ready to gauge your students’ level of understanding (i.e., after delivering your instruction, at the end of a class period, etc.), project a single task card using a document camera or your computer and projector.  Have students answer the question(s) on the task card on a slip of paper.  Collect the slips afterward and go through students’ answers.  I like to make a pile of correct answers and another of incorrect answers.  This provides me with a clear visual of how the majority are doing!
• As students are leaving class, have students line up and give each student a task card.  Students must give you the task card with their answer before they exit the classroom.  If you have a clipboard with your roster, you can easily jot down who answers correctly and who does not.  This will tell you who is understanding the concept and who is not.  
• Have students do a self-assessment and reflection.  You can post all your task cards around the room and have your students respond to them all.  Afterwards, project the answers to students and have them record their correct and incorrect answers.  Finally, have students write a few sentences to reflect on what they could do easily, the types of questions they got wrong, where they felt they were struggling, and what would be helpful for them to better understand the material.  You could make up a form for this so that it is streamlined for students, and that is applicable for any concept you’re studying!  Once you’ve made it, you’ll have it forever!

Are you interested in some task card sets to help you formatively assess your students?  Here are 3 of my favorites:

#2 Preguntas Personales

Preguntas personales are pretty straightforward – simply ask students an opinion-based question or two about the material you’re studying in your lesson or unit.  Preguntas personales are a great way to not only see what content your students understand, but also their abilities to respond to questions appropriately.  This is an important skill for engaging in both written and spoken conversation in Spanish, so continual practice and assessment of this skill are super beneficial for students!

Here are a few ways that you can use preguntas personales as formative assessments:

• Project or write 1-2 preguntas personales on your board, and have your students write their answers on slips of paper.  Collect students’ answers and assess them.  Since you only asked students 1-2 questions, it should not take you as much time to go through them!
• Ask your students 1-2 preguntas personales verbally at the end of class as an exit ticket.  Varying the questions is a good idea, because if you ask the same question, students might simply listen to their classmates who answer first and repeat their responses.  Using a clipboard and a roster, mark down who answers correctly and who does not.  That way, you’ll be able to see if the majority of your students are able to answer correctly, or if they need additional practice and support with this skill.
• Ask your students to respond to 1-2 preguntas personales digitally, using Google Forms or your LMS (Canvas, Schoology, Google Classroom, etc.).  If you go this route, I recommend using some kind of restricting software like Securly or GoGuardian to reduce incidences of translator use.  A major positive of using technology is that it is easy to quickly go through students’ responses and leave them feedback!  

Check out some of my read-to-use preguntas personales sets here for easy formative assessment questions!

#3 Boom Cards

If you have never used Boom Cards before, they are self-correcting digital task cards hosted through the Boom Learning website.  This is so helpful, because students get immediate feedback and you save time!  With an upgraded membership, students’ results will be saved for you to review at your convenience.  The best part is, reviewing the results is ALL you have to do, since the Boom Cards correct themselves!  You can view the data by individual students or by the class as a whole, which is also nice.

However, you can still use Boom Cards as formative assessments even with a free account.  You can still assign Boom Cards decks to your students, and they will receive that immediate feedback as they work through the decks.  Students’ progress will not be saved, but you can have your students reflect on their performance and submit that to you for you to review.  You might ask students to keep a tally of how many questions they got right and wrong, to identify what material they knew well and any area(s) of difficulty, and which types of cards they found particularly helpful (or not helpful).  This provides you with information you can use to design the most useful learning activities in future classes!

Check out a free deck of Boom Cards on weather below!

Want other Boom Cards sets?  Check out my favorites here!

I hope this was helpful!  If you have anything to add to this list, I would love to hear it!  Leave me a comment to let me know your favorite ways to formatively assess your students without losing your sanity.  Have a wonderful week, profes!