Every student doesn't learn at the same pace or from having the same experience; Pearson Connexus's formative assessments help identify and provide personalized opportunities to learn.
Formative assessments are given to monitor student progress, so a teacher can tailor feedback and direction moving forward. To accomplish this, they are generally administered at the beginning of or midway through a semester, unit, etc., to evaluate a student's mastery of specific objectives and then determine which content should be automatically assigned to students.
When students demonstrate mastery of aligned objectives on the formative assessment, Pearson Connexus automatically allows them to skip activities meant to teach to those objectives. Students are automatically notified that they have been excused from activities upon finishing the assessment.
To create a formative assessment:
- Add an Assessment activity to the desired folder, or select an existing assessment and select the pencil (edit) icon.
- Open the Settings tab in the Assessment activity editor.
- Check the Formative box in the Advanced assessment options card. If you want the assessment's score included in the final grade, check the Include formative in final grade box; checking this box makes the score visible to students.
- Select Save or select the Questions tab to create assessment questions.
Align objectives to activities and assessment questions
The second part of setting up a formative assessment is aligning the targeted objectives with both the assessment questions and the activities that you want students to be able to "test out" of and skip.
- Make sure the objectives are available in the course: How do I create and/or import objectives?
- Align the activities that you want students to be able to skip with objectives: How do I align activities with objectives?
- Align assessment questions with objectives: How to align objectives with assessment questions?
Configure passing criteria
To configure the passing criteria:
- Select the Editor tool from the desired course card on the Home page.
- Select Tools in the Header menu and then select Course settings.
- On the Objective mastery card, under Formative Assessment, specify the Minimum number of questions that need to be aligned with an objective, as well as the overall Minimum score a student has to earn on those questions in order to skip the activities meant to teach the objective.
- Select Save.
