Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kai Le. Just to give you a little background about myself - I was attached to Naval Base Primary School from 2019 to 2021. So, the one thing I really learnt in my three years there is Formative Assessment. Primary school teachers incorporate a lot of FA tools in their teaching, so I'm glad to share with everyone some of the things I learnt then. 

First things first, I am going to teach you the American Sign Language signs for A to C. One thing I really missed about primary school teaching is the FAST Kit. It is included in every student's planner, so I could use it to test students' understanding easily. But there's no FAST Kit in our student planner, right? One fateful day, a brainwave came over me. I could teach students how to sign A to D so that they could indicate their responses. I taught them on the spot - and I have been getting them to sign their responses ever since. Here's an example of how I got students to show me their answer for a plural form of nouns exercise.

Before I carry on the presentation, I will like to explain briefly what summative assessment means, since we are more familiar with that. So, we often sit for tests and examinations, right? These forms of assessment are categorised under summative assessment and provide important information about students’ standards of performance.

Now that we understand summative assessment, I will like to ask everyone "What do you understand by the term 'Formative Assessment'?" Please access the Mentimeter poll and type your thoughts away. 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Let me tell you the WALT statement for today's workshop. 'WALT' stands for We Are Learning To and makes explicit the learning objective for a particular lesson. I don't know about other primary schools but at Naval Base Primary School, the letters 'WALT' are imprinted onto the whiteboard and given a designated space. So, all students will know where to find the WALT statement and check their understanding of the teacher's instruction as a lesson progresses.

Applying the WALT statement to our school's context. So here are examples of WALT statements teachers from the various disciplines will come up with when teaching their students: 

• place cutlery at a dining table accurately (Hospitality)
• display merchandise on a shelf neatly (Retail)
• perform leak testing in a refrigerator (Facility Services)
• help senior citizens to do simple rehabilitation exercises (Community Care Support)

So, what is formative assessment? Allow me to introduce you to Dylan Wiliam, a professor who has provided much thought leadership on formative assessment. In his own words, formative assessment refers to "all those activities undertaken by teachers, and/or by students, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged.” This is because as teachers, it makes more sense to pay attention to our students during lessons to see what they understand and where they need more instruction. 

Let me flesh out the concept of formative assessment with a few examples. The first question refers to an English quiz on our Student Learning System. The marks won't be recorded on the students' report cards. So, is this a) a formative assessment, b) a summative assessment, or c) both? At the count of 3, sign me your answer.

Yes, most of you are right. The English quiz is a formative assessment since it enables me to know the students' weak areas. In this case, knowing that many students got Q3 wrong alerted me to how I should introduce them to word pairs. Hence, in my subsequent quiz, I made sure to highlight the fact that a fare is the fee paid by a passenger for his/her use of public transport.

to be continued