Formative assessment

Formative assessment, formative evaluation, formative feedback, or assessment for learning, including diagnostic testing, is a range of formal and informal assessment procedures conducted by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment. The goal of a formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work. It also helps faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately. It typically involves qualitative feedback for both student and teacher that focuses on the details of content and performance. It is commonly contrasted with summative assessment, which seeks to monitor educational outcomes, often for purposes of external accountability.

Definition

Formative assessment involves a continuous way of checks and balances in the teaching learning processes. The method allows teachers to frequently check their learners' progress and the effectiveness of their own practice, thus allowing for self assessment of the student. Practice in a classroom is formative to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited.
Formative assessments give in-process feedback about what students are or are not learning so instructional approaches, teaching materials, and academic support can be modified to the students' needs. They are not graded, can be informal in nature, and they may take a variety of forms.
Formative assessments are generally low stakes, which means that they have low or no point value. Examples of formative assessments include asking students to draw a concept map in class to represent their understanding of a topic, submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a lecture, or turn in a research proposal for early feedback.

Origin of the term

coined the terms formative and summative evaluation in 1967, and emphasized their differences both in terms of the goals of the information they seek and how the information is used. For Scriven, formative evaluation gathered information to assess the effectiveness of a curriculum and guide school system choices as to which curriculum to adopt and how to improve it. Benjamin Bloom took up the term in 1968 in the book Learning for Mastery to consider formative assessment as a tool for improving the teaching-learning process for students. His subsequent 1971 book Handbook of Formative and Summative Evaluation, written with Thomas Hasting and George Madaus, showed how formative assessments could be linked to instructional units in a variety of content areas. It is this approach that reflects the generally accepted meaning of the term today.
For both Scriven and Bloom, an assessment, whatever its other uses, is only formative if it is used to alter subsequent educational decisions. Subsequently, however, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam suggested this definition is too restrictive, since formative assessments may be used to provide evidence that the intended course of action was indeed appropriate. They propose that practice in a classroom is formative to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited.

Versus summative assessment

The type of assessment that people may be more familiar with is summative assessment. The table below shows some basic differences between the two types of assessment.

	Summative assessment	Formative assessment
When	At the end of a learning activity	During a learning activity
Goal	To make a decision	To improve learning
Feedback	Final judgement	Return to material
Frame of reference	Sometimes normative ; sometimes criterion	Always criterion

Principles

Among the most comprehensive listing of principles of assessment for learning are those written by the QCA. The authority, which is sponsored by England's Department for Children, Schools and Families, is responsible for national curriculum, assessment, and examinations. Their principal focus is on crucial aspects of assessment for learning, including how such assessment should be seen as central to classroom practice, and that all teachers should regard assessment for learning as a key professional skill.
identifies "The big 5 principles of assessment for learning":

The provision of effective feedback to students.
The active involvement of students in their own learning.
Adjusting teaching to take account of the results of the assessment.
Recognition of the profound influence assessment has on the motivation and self-esteem of pupils, both of which are critical influences on learning.
The need for students to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve.

In the United States, the Assessment For Learning Project has identified four "core shifts" and ten "emerging principles" of assessment for learning:
Core shifts

Purpose of Assessment: From exposing inequity to enacting equity
Process of Assessment: From an isolated event to an integrated process
Priorities of Assessment: From evaluating students to encouraging reflection and feedback
Product of Assessment: From averages and scores to bodies of evidence of learning

Emerging principles

Meaningful Tasks, Worthy Evidence, and Authentic Validation
Coherence Among Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
Clear and Transparent Learning Targets
Accessible and Inclusive Design for All Learners
Active Student Participation with Structured Reflection
Specific, Actionable Feedback
Support of Positive Mindsets and Identities
Community-engaged Readiness Definitions
Professional Expertise, Collaboration, and Calibration
Systems of Assessments Designed from the Student Out
Rationale and practice

Formative assessment serves several purposes:

to provide feedback for teachers to modify subsequent learning activities and experiences;
to identify and remediate group or individual deficiencies;
to move focus away from achieving grades and onto learning processes, in order to increase self efficacy and reduce the negative impact of extrinsic motivation;
to improve students' metacognitive awareness of how they learn.
"frequent, ongoing assessment allows both for fine-tuning of instruction and student focus on progress."

Characteristics of formative assessment:
According to, formative assessment:

is essentially positive in intent, in that it is directed towards promoting learning; it is therefore part of teaching;
it takes into account the progress of each individual, the effort put in and other aspects of learning which may be unspecified in the curriculum; in other words, it is not purely criterion-referenced;
it has to take into account several instances in which certain skills and ideas are used and there will be inconsistencies as well as patterns in behavior; such inconsistencies would be 'error' in summative evaluation, but in formative evaluation they provide diagnostic information;
validity and usefulness are paramount in formative assessment and should take precedence over concerns for reliability;
even more than assessment for other purposes, formative assessment requires that pupils have a central part in it; pupils have to be active in their own learning and unless they come to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and how they might deal with them, they will not make progress.

Feedback is the central function of formative assessment. It typically involves a focus on the detailed content of what is being learnt, rather than simply a test score or other measurement of how far a student is falling short of the expected standard.

Examples

The time between formative assessment and adjustments to learning can be a matter of seconds or a matter of months. Some examples of formative assessment are:

Students are asked to self-assess their own learning products with the support of a list with criteria, thereby generating feedback for their own learning process. This has been found to improve learning in the field of science education when students are asked to self-assess their own conceptions of a scientific topic.
A language teacher asks students to choose the best thesis statement from a selection; if all choose correctly she moves on; if only some do she may initiate a class discussion; if most answer incorrectly then she may review the work on thesis statements.
A teacher asks her students to write down, in a brainstorm activity, all they know about how hot-air balloons work so that she can discover what students already know about the area of science she is intending to teach.
A science supervisor looks at the previous year's student test results to help plan teacher workshops during the summer vacation, to address areas of weakness in student performance.
A teacher documents student work and student conferences to help plan authentic activities to meet student needs
Students could be given each one of three "traffic cards" to indicate the level at which they are understanding a concept during a lesson. Green means that the student is understanding the concept and the teacher can move on, yellow indicates that the instructor should slow down because the student is only somewhat understanding the concept, and red indicates that the student wishes that the teacher stops and explains a specific concept more clearly because they are not understanding it.
As students are leaving class, the teacher asks them to answer the following question and submit it with their name to exit the class: "Name one important thing you learned in class today." This helps students synthesize what they had done that day and provides feedback to the teacher about the class.
A teacher asks students to draw a concept map in class to represent their understanding of a topic.
A teacher asks students to submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a lecture.
A teacher asks students to turn in a research proposal for early feedback.
Lesson exit ticket to summarize what students have learned.
A teacher uses an entry ticket to start class off with a quick question for students to answer about the previous day's lesson.
A teacher asks students to draw a sketch to visually represent new knowledge.