What Teachers Really Need to Know About Formative Assessment

Laura Greenstein

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781416609964
• eBook ISBN: 9781416612223
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What does formative assessment look like, and when should I use it? What kind of planning does it require, and what kinds of data does it generate? How will formative assessment improve my teaching and help my students succeed in a standards-based environment? How does it relate to my application of multiple intelligences theory, to differentiated instruction, and to everything else I'm already doing in my classroom?

In this volume, author Laura Greenstein has gathered what you really need to know in order to make formative assessment a seamless part of your everyday practice. Emphasizing formative assessment application in secondary schools but applicable to teachers of all grade levels and all subject areas, this book provides

* Straightforward answers to teachers' most frequently asked questions
* Dozens of strategies for measuring student understanding and diagnosing learning needs before, during, and after instruction
* Illustrations of formative assessment across the content areas, from math to language arts to science to social studies to health and physical education
* Guidance on making data-informed instructional adjustments
* Sample templates for organizing assessment data to track both whole-class and individual progress toward identified goals
* Case studies to illustrate effective and ineffective formative assessment and deepen your understanding

If you're looking to take formative assessment from theory to practice—and from practice to genuine learning improvement—this is the place to begin.

Part 1

Building Foundations

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Questions to Consider

• How does formative assessment differ from summative assessment?
• What makes assessment formative? Is it the strategies used, when the strategies are used, or how the teacher applies assessment data?
• Is formative assessment appropriate in some subject areas but not others?
• What can we learn from foundational studies and reports on formative assessment, especially those published by Rick Stiggins and Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam?

Your turn: Take a quick glance at the material in this part of the book and write two other questions that immediately come to mind.

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This section of the book focuses on the base knowledge that will support a conceptual shift from traditional assessment to formative assessment and its various strategies. Understanding the theory behind formative assessment practice will help you make sound decisions about using it.

Chapter 1 presents formative assessment's key principles, illustrated with some samples from classroom practice, and provides a brief history of formative assessment's development. Chapter 2 focuses on the answers to the most commonly asked questions about formative assessment.

Chapter 1

The Fundamentals of Formative Assessment

This chapter looks at the essential principles of formative assessment and provides a preview of best practice. Our focus here is both the content and context of formative assessment: its basic elements and some of the reasons it has risen to prominence and gained support as an effective means of improving student learning.

Essential Principles

The information in this section has been gathered from numerous sources and aligned around three significant concepts: (1) formative assessment is student focused, (2) formative assessment is instructionally informative, and (3) formative assessment is outcomes based.

In an effort not to duplicate information available in other resources, I have condensed the elements and their definitions quite a bit. If you would like to read more about the fundamentals of formative assessment, I recommend "Working Inside the Black Box" (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2004); Classroom Assessment for Student Learning: Doing It Right— Using It Well (Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2004); and Classroom Assessment and Grading That Work (Marzano, 2006).

Formative Assessment Is Student Focused

Formative assessment is purposefully directed toward the student. It does not emphasize how teachers deliver information but, rather, how students receive that information, how well they understand it, and how they can apply it. With formative assessment, teachers gather information about their students' progress and learning needs and use this information to make instructional adjustments. They also show students how to accurately and honestly use self-assessments to improve their own learning. Instructional flexibility and student-focused feedback work together to build confident and motivated learners.

In brief: Formative assessment helps teachers

• Consider each student's learning needs and styles and adapt instruction accordingly
• Track individual student achievement
• Provide appropriately challenging and motivational instructional activities
• Design intentional and objective student self-assessments
• Offer all students opportunities for improvement

In practice: Students in Mrs. Chavez's English class are studying character development. They have read about Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.

Early in the unit, Mrs. Chavez asks her students to define a character trait and give an example of someone in literature or in real life who demonstrates that trait. She gathers their examples in a list, which she posts in the classroom. This is valuable information about the starting point for the unit: in this case, it helps the teacher determine whether she needs to clarify the concept of character traits or can move on with the application of character traits to literature.

Based on the data her students provide, Mrs. Chavez decides to move forward. She arranges the class into random groups and asks each group to write all the character traits of Scout that they can think of on individual yellow sticky notes—one trait per note—and then do the same for Holden Caulfield, this time using blue sticky notes. Then each group posts their responses on the original list of traits, alongside each character trait. Areas of agreement and disagreement are discussed. Mrs. Chavez uses a questioning strategy to elicit information and to clarify any lingering gaps in understanding or accuracy. Following this, students work on their own to create a T chart for each character, using the left side of the T to list life experiences and challenges and the right side to list how these factors have influenced traits and behaviors. Note that Mrs. Chavez has done very little lecturing or whole-class teaching to this point, making for a very student-focused lesson.

Formative Assessment Is Instructionally Informative

During instruction, teachers assess student understanding and progress toward standards mastery in order to evaluate the effectiveness of their instructional design. Both teachers and students, individually and together, review and reflect on assessment outcomes. As teachers gather information from formative assessment, they adjust their instruction to further student learning.

In brief: Formative assessment

• Provides a way to align standards, content, and assessment
• Allows for the purposeful selection of strategies
• Embeds assessment in instruction
• Guides instructional decisions

In practice: During a high school social studies unit on the development of American nationalism after the War of 1812, Mr. Sandusky uses a series of assessments to monitor his students' developing understanding of the presented material. Mr. Sandusky begins with a pre-assessment focused on content similar to what students will encounter in the final selected-response test. After reviewing the pre-assessment data, he concludes that his students either remember little of their prior learning about the material or haven't been exposed to these topics before. He had intended to begin the unit with a discussion of how the popularity of "The Star-Spangled Banner" fueled nationalistic spirit but decides to alter those plans somewhat by having students read articles about the War of 1812, grouping them by readiness and assigning purposefully selected readings. One group reads about the reasons the United States and Britain went to war, another reads about specific events that occurred during the war, and a third reads about Francis Scott Key. Each group reports out, sharing information with the rest of the class.

As the unit progresses, students keep track of their learning and assignments on a work-along, turning it in to Mr. Sandusky every day for a quick check. For example, they describe causes of the war, answer a question about Key's motivation to write "The Star-Spangled Banner," and note the location of the battle he observed (Baltimore's Fort McHenry). This is followed by a Corners activity where students pick different lines of the song to analyze and respond to in terms of relevance to current events. Later, after a discussion of the diverse opinions on the War of 1812, the teacher asks students to report one pro and one con viewpoint. To probe students' understanding of the significant outcomes of the war, he asks the class to describe three specific changes in the power of the U.S. government that resulted from the war. In these activities, Mr. Sandusky works to align his formative assessment questions with the lesson's specific objectives, incorporate the questions into instruction, and use the information to guide future instruction.

Formative Assessment Is Outcomes Based

Formative assessment focuses on achieving goals rather than determining if a goal was or was not met, and one of the ways it does so is by helping to clarify learning goals and standards for both teachers and students. Teaching and learning are based on these standards. Students know the criteria for meeting the standards and are frequently shown exemplars. Teachers give frequent and substantive feedback to students about their progress, pointing out both strengths and areas that need improvement. Teachers plan steps to move students closer to learning goals. Work is assessed primarily on quality in relation to standards rather than student attitude or effort.

In brief: Formative assessment

• Emphasizes learning outcomes
• Makes goals and standards transparent to students
• Provides clear assessment criteria
• Closes the gap between what students know and desired outcomes
• Provides feedback that is comprehensible, actionable, and relevant
• Provides valuable diagnostic information by generating informative data

In practice: A curricular standard for 10th grade Biology requires that students understand the chemical basis of all living things. In her classroom, Ms. Jefferson asks students to track their progress toward the specific objective of describing, comparing, and contrasting the molecular structure of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. The applied learning comes from explaining how these differences are exhibited by foods that students eat every day. Ms. Jefferson uses a signaling activity to get a baseline assessment of where her students stand; afterward, she delivers a traditional lecture, beginning the lesson (as she will all lessons) by stating the specific learning outcome students are expected to master and then focusing on transitioning students from what they know to what they need to know. Students keep a record of their learning by recording specific content knowledge in lab report notebooks. In one section, they draw the molecular structure of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Later in the unit, they watch a video and fill in a provided empty outline and then complete a lab in which they test a variety of foods for the presence of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats and report their findings in their lab notebooks. Ms. Jefferson reviews these notebooks regularly to monitor student progress and understanding, provide specific feedback, and inform her instructional decisions. Other formative assessment strategies she uses include Bump in the Road and Feathers and Salt.

A Brief History of Formative Assessment

As with most effective teaching methods and practices, individual teachers have probably used formative assessment throughout history. Indeed, we could claim Socrates as an early practitioner. Peppering his students with questions that probed and provoked, he used their responses to measure their learning and guide his instruction; this is the primary attribute of formative assessment.

Although teachers have long used strategies like the Socratic method and other forms of meaningful questioning, the term "formative assessment" is a relatively new one. Its contemporary use is often traced to Michael Scriven (1967), who used "formative" and "summative" to indicate differences in both the goals for collecting evaluation information and how that information is then used. Scriven explained that while a program is in the planning and developmental stages, it is still malleable, and the information gathered from evaluation can therefore contribute to change in the program. He called evaluation for this purpose of improving "formative." Once a program has been created and implemented, Scriven argued, evaluations can only yield information to determine whether the program has met its intended goals. Scriven called this final gathering of information a "summative evaluation."

Benjamin Bloom was one of the first to apply the concepts of formative versus summative to educational assessment, helping to lay the foundations for the concept of mastery learning (Bloom, Hastings, & Madaus, 1971). The purpose of mastery learning was to ensure that students didn't move forward to the next level of learning until they had demonstrated mastery of the learning objectives set for the current level. This concept, in turn, became the basis for modular instruction, widespread in the 1970s, in which students learned from self-directed packets, or modules of instruction. When a student successfully completed one packet, he or she could move on to the next packet, proceeding through modules until all objectives were met. In theory, mastery learning resembles today's scaffolding, but in practice, students worked mostly in isolation without much teacher support or peer interaction.

In the decades following, formative assessment began to be more widely explored. States considered ways to embed it in standardized tests. Bloom continued his theoretical work, examining several issues relating to formative assessment. He identified two essential elements of formative learning: feedback for students and corrective conditions for all important components of learning (Bloom, 1977). He also argued that formative information could be used to divide the class into cooperative groups based on the corrections required. From this point, teachers could differentiate instruction to meet the needs of individual students through selected teaching strategies and corrective responses (Bloom, 1976).

In New Zealand, Terry Crooks studied the effect of classroom assessment practices on students and reported on their potential to emphasize what is important to learn and positively affect student motivation. Crooks (1988) asserted that classroom assessment "appears to be one of the most potent forces influencing education. Accordingly it deserves very careful planning and considerable investment of time from educators" (p. 476). Around the same time, Sadler (1989) reasoned that assessment is most effective when students can monitor the quality of their own work through specific provisions that are incorporated directly into instruction.

Perhaps the biggest step forward in the embrace of formative assessment came in 1998, when Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam completed a meta-analysis of more than 250 research studies on the topic. Their findings, published as "Inside the Black Box," make a compelling case for formative assessment. Black and Wiliam's review concluded that "there is no other way of raising standards for which such a strong prima facie case can be made" (1998, p. 148).

"Inside the Black Box" led the way for many educational leaders to define and apply formative assessment in classrooms, not just in the United States but throughout the world. New Zealand, Australia, and Great Britain have been especially strong leaders in this movement. The recent groundswell in interest and information is creating an imperative to change how we think about and use assessment.

Evidence for Formative Assessment

The 1998 Black and Wiliam study provided evidence that formative assessment can make a difference in learning outcomes at all grade levels. This review of research studies, journal articles, and book excerpts concluded that "formative assessment shows an effect size of between .4 and .7, the equivalent of going from the 50th percentile to the 65th" (p. 141). An effect size is a comparison of a range of scores of students exposed to a specific practice to those of students who were not exposed to the practice. Black and Wiliam drew additional conclusions, each of which is worthy of further research:

• The success of formative assessment is highly related to how teachers use it to adjust teaching and learning practices.
• Effective learning is based on active student involvement.
• Enhanced feedback is crucial to improved outcomes.
• There is a link between formative assessment and self-assessment.

More information about the Black and Wiliam study is available through the Web site of Kings College London (www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/sspp/education/research/groups/assess.html).

At the National Research Council, Bransford, Brown, and Cocking's work How People Learn (1999) became the basis for the book Knowing What Students Know (Pellegrino, Chudowsky, & Glaser, 2001) and drew the following conclusions:

• An assessment plan must come first, not last, in the educational process.
• Assessment, by necessity, integrates knowledge, skills, procedures, and dispositions.
• Assessment as a diagnosis of student progress shifts the emphasis from summative to formative.

In a follow-up to "Inside the Black Box," Wiliam, Lee, Harrison, and Black (2004) examined the achievement of secondary students in math and science who were exposed and not exposed to formative assessment. Teachers involved in the study were trained and supported in their use of classroom-based formative assessment. The research team measured the effects of formative assessment on learning outcomes and found a mean effect size of 0.32 when exposed to the intervention. Also in 2004, Ruiz-Primo and Furta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Building Foundations
• Chapter 1. The Fundamentals of Formative Assessment
• Chapter 2. Questions and Answers About Formative Assessment
• Part 2: Using Formative Assessment
• Chapter 3. Formative Assessment Prior to Instruction
• Chapter 4. Formative Assessment During Instruction
• Chapter 5. Formative Assessment After Instruction
• Part 3: Making Connections and Furthering Change
• Chapter 6. Improving Teaching and Learning Through Formative Assessment
• Chapter 7. Balancing Assessment Practices
• Appendix A. Glossary of Assessment Terms
• Appendix B. Lexicon of Formative Assessment Strategies
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Copyright