5. Needing students to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve
The group suggests that formative assessment—at least in the way many people use it—is not a helpful term for describing such uses of assessment because, as it says, “the term ‘formative’ itself is open to a variety of interpretations and often means no more than that assessment is carried out frequently and is planned at the same time as teaching” (Broadfoot et al., 1999, p. 7). Instead, it suggests that it would be better to use the phrase assessment for learning.
The earliest use of the term assessment for learning appears to be in the book Assessment for Learning in the Mentally Handicapped (Mittler, 1973). Harry Black (1986) used the term as the title of a chapter in the book Assessing Educational Achievement, and Mary James brought it to a wider audience as the title of a paper presented at the 1992 annual conference of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development in New Orleans (James, 1992), but the term has become common in North America as a result of the work of Rick Stiggins, who adopted the term assessment for learning as being very different from formative assessment.
In the United States, for many years, educators used the term formative assessment to describe a process for monitoring student achievement. Students took assessments at regular periods (typically four to ten weeks), and teachers then looked at the resulting data to determine which students were making sufficient progress and which were not. Where students were not making sufficient progress, teachers would investigate what might be done to improve progress (such assessments are also called benchmark assessments or interim assessments).
Now it is important to realize that monitoring student progress is a good thing to do. Any well-run organization should be able to monitor its progress toward its goals. As W. Edwards Deming is reputed to have said, “In God we trust. All others bring data” (Hastie, Tibshirani, & Friedman, 2009, p. vii). However, if formative assessment merely identifies which students are falling behind, then it limits the impact on student achievement. It is in response to this limited view of formative assessment that Rick Stiggins (2005), founder of the Assessment Training Institute, writes:
If formative assessment is about more frequent, assessment FOR learning is about continuous. If formative assessment is about providing teachers with evidence, assessment FOR learning is about informing the students themselves. If formative assessment tells users who is and who is not meeting state standards, assessment FOR learning tells them what progress each student is making toward meeting each standard while the learning is happening—when there’s still time to be helpful. (pp. 1–2)
However, just replacing the term formative assessment with the term assessment for learning merely clouds the definitional issue (Bennett, 2011). What really matters is what kind of processes we value, not what we call them. The problem, as researcher Randy Bennett (2011) points out, is that it is an oversimplification to say that formative assessment is only a matter of process or only a matter of instrumentation. Good processes require good instruments, and instruments are useless unless teachers use them intelligently.
The original, literal meaning of the word formative, according to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, is “capable of alteration by growth and development” (“formative,” 2017). This suggests that formative assessments should shape instruction—our formative experiences are those that have shaped our current selves—and so we need a definition that can accommodate all the ways in which assessment can shape instruction. And there are many. Consider the following eight scenarios.
1. In spring 2016, a science curriculum supervisor needs to plan the summer workshops that the district will offer to its middle school science teachers. She analyzes the scores the district’s middle school students obtained on the 2015 state tests and notes that while the science scores are generally comparable to those of the rest of the state, the students in her district appear to be scoring rather poorly on items involving physical sciences when compared with those testing life sciences. She decides to make physical science the focus of the professional development activities offered in summer 2016, which are well attended by the district’s middle school science teachers. Teachers return to school in fall 2016 and use the revised instructional methods they have developed over the summer. As a result, when students take the state test in spring 2017, the achievement of middle school students in the district on items involving physical sciences increases, and so the district’s performance on the state tests, reported in summer 2017, improves.
2. Each year, a group of algebra 1 high school teachers reviews students’ performance on a statewide algebra 1 test and, in particular, looks at the facility (proportion correct) for each item on the test. When item facilities are lower than the group expects, the group looks at how teachers prepared and delivered instruction on that aspect of the curriculum and considers ways in which teachers can strengthen the instruction in the following year.
3. A school district administers a series of interim tests, tied to the curriculum, at intervals of six to ten weeks to check on student progress. The district uses past experience to determine a threshold that gives students an 80 percent chance of passing the state test, and requires students whose interim test scores fall below the threshold to attend additional instruction on Saturday mornings.
4. Since 2003, the School District of Philadelphia has mandated a core curriculum that includes a tightly sequenced planning and scheduling timeline, in which the school year is divided up into a number of six-week cycles. In each six-week cycle, the district expects teachers to use the first five weeks for instruction, at the end of which students take a multiple-choice test, which the teachers can use to determine how to spend the final week of the cycle. If students have done well, teachers typically schedule enrichment and enhancement activities, but if there are significant weaknesses in students’ understanding, the final week becomes a “re-teaching week” (Oláh, Lawrence, & Riggan, 2010).
5. A middle school science teacher is designing a unit on pulleys and levers. She allocates fourteen periods to the unit, but plans to cover all the content in the first eleven periods. Building on ideas common in Japan (see, for example, Lewis, 2002), in period twelve, the teacher gives the students a quiz and collects the papers. Instead of grading the papers, she reads through them carefully, and based on what she discovers about what the class has and has not learned, she plans appropriate remedial activity for periods thirteen and fourteen.
6. A history teacher has been teaching about the issue of bias in historical sources. Three minutes before the end of the lesson, students pack away their books and receive an index card on which the teacher asks them to respond to the question “Why are historians concerned about bias in historical sources?” The students turn in these exit passes as they leave the class at the end of the period. After all the students leave, the teacher reads through the cards and then discards them, concluding that the students’ answers indicate a good-enough understanding for the teacher to move on to a new chapter.
7. A language arts teacher has been teaching his students about different kinds of figurative language. Before moving on, he wants to check his students’ understanding of the terms he has been teaching, so he uses a real-time test. The teacher gives each student a set of six cards bearing the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F; and on the board, he displays the following.
A. Alliteration
B. Onomatopoeia
C. Hyperbole
D. Personification
E. Simile
F. Metaphor
He then reads a series of statements.
• This backpack weighs a ton.
• He was as tall as a house.
• The sweetly smiling sunshine melted all the snow.
• He honked his horn at the cyclist.
• He was a bull in a china shop.
After the teacher reads each statement, he asks the class to hold