Formative Assessment Concerns

Formative Assessment is a great tool to use throughout the school day.  There are a lot of positive aspects of the assessing tool but there are some things that concern me.  I am worried about what to do with the students I know who understand the concept by doing my formative assessment and helping the other students who are struggling.  Through formative assessment, I will know which students understand and which ones need extra time and help.  I will have to help the confused students.  I am worried that the students who are quicker to understand concepts will not get to achieve their full potential because they are not given the proper opportunities to succeed.  This is due to the concentration being on the lower achieving students.  They still need to improve themselves even though they are on grade level, they are not achieving the most they can and that is unacceptable.  I also  do not know when a good time is to move on to the next subject if not all students have grasped the concept.  There are so many objectives needing to be met in a year and if we wait for every student to understand the concept concretely then not all objectives will be explored.
I will definitely need to come up with a plan to facilitate the learning of higher order thinking and inventive thinking for the students who are quicker to understand.  I will do this by giving those students opportunities to dig down deeper into the concept by taking other steps of analysis, application, and creation while the other students are working on remembering and understanding.  This way both sets of students get authentic learning experiences.  To make sure all objectives are met, there comes a point where the class must move on.  The students who do not understand will get the concepts intertwined in other subjects and objectives throughout the year.  This way they all get all the objectives hit and have a concreate understanding of them.
Formative assessment will help me determine which students need the extra help and which ones need deeper thinking work.