NGSS and formative assessment

NGSS:
The main idea of NGSS is to get students actually doing the science themselves to understand the scientific concepts. It is also very inquiry driven. This is very important for my future classroom because it means that science class will look much more like a science lab (which I find exciting!). When I was in elementary, middle, and high school all we did was memorize facts and an ocassionally experiment if we were lucky. These experiments weren't like real science though because we just followed steps to get results and stopped there. NGSS seems to be promoting the type of science lab that I experienced while in biology and chemistry in college. We weren't finished with our experiments when we got our results. We had to explain why we got those results, how we got those results, and what did I mean. I'm enthralled that this is what NGSS is pushing because it shows students the joy of science much better than just memorizing things about science.

Formative Assessment:
They mean that formative assessment is much more useful for both me as a teacher and my future students. It shows me where they are which helps me make the decision of where we need to go from there. I think it is an amazing idea to include the students in the goal setting of their learning because that shows them where they should be working towards. This promotes self-evaluation which is a wonderful lifelong skill that my students could then apply to real life situations. I think that summative assessment is useless because it's not used to inform instructual decisions. If testing isn't used to help our students improve, that time could be used better elsewhere.