Formative assessments take many different forms: exit tickets, quizzes, rough drafts of written assignments, prototypes for projects, and more. Whenever you have evidence of students learning, it can be used as a formative assessment. Even the summative test results can be used to see areas of strengths and weaknesses to inform the teaching of future classes.

I know that you’re giving everything you can to your schools right now, leaving very little time to read through emails and blogs. For Almy Education’s last February blog post, I’ve recapped all of our February communications (newsletters, blogs, emails, etc.), all in one centralized location.

The concept of the exit ticket is that students must turn in a ticket before exiting the class. They are quick to administer, only requiring the last two to three minutes of class and they can provide good information on where students are in terms of next steps. In this blog, we talk about these four main purposes and how these exit tickets benefit you or your students.

Developmental math in its traditional form poorly serves students who need it the most. These are the students who have the greatest challenges to overcome, often through circumstances beyond their control. For as much as has been done in this arena, there are still so many issues with developmental math. And those problems are only worse when we drill down in the data and disaggregate it.

As we prepare for schools to reopen in the near future, we need to ask if we truly want to go back to exactly how things were before the pandemic started. We have an opportunity to make changes for the better for our whole nation. What lessons have we learned and what do we want our educational system to look like?

I know that you’re giving everything you can to your schools right now, leaving very little time to read through emails and blogs. For Almy Education’s last January blog post, I want to do things a bit differently. I’ve recapped our January communications (newsletters, blogs, emails, etc.), all in one centralized location.

We know too well that if students are not engaged, they will not learn. In this blog post we discuss goal orientation; ego-involved, task-completion, and learning, and how this impacts student success.

Higher education already had problems before Covid-19. The inconsistent and inequitable solutions colleges and universities were implementing to improve retention, persistence, and completion are insufficient. Remote learning only made the problems more apparent. Here’s what we’re doing to change that.

Facts about the Covid-19 vaccine and how your body may react to it. We talk about molecular biology, cell biology, and immunology and the safety of this mRNA vaccine.

We cannot address data analysis without discussing how to represent data and communicate it clearly using graphs. Similar to the data analysis process, we usually tell students how to create a graph, but rarely let them try, and fail, to make an appropriate graph for themselves. This week, we’ll address how to teach students to make appropriate choices when it comes to creating graphs.