3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward
4. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
5. Activating learners as owners of their own learning
In each of these five chapters, I present a summary of the research evidence that shows the impact of the strategy, and I offer a number of practical techniques that teachers have used—some in the literature, and others in classrooms that I have observed—to incorporate the strategy into their regular classroom practice. Although there is a definite progression throughout the chapters, I have made each chapter as self-contained as possible.
In all, these five chapters describe over seventy practical techniques for classroom formative assessment. Most of these techniques are not new. What is new is the framework for formative assessment presented in chapter 2, which shows how these disparate techniques fit together, and the research evidence that shows that these techniques are powerful ways to increase student engagement and help teachers become more responsive to their students’ needs.
As I have encountered many hundreds of teachers over the course of my career investigating formative assessment, I have not been able to recall the specific names of teachers and the dates on which I observed their classrooms in every instance in this book. Additionally, other observations occurred as part of research studies in which we granted the teachers anonymity for their contributions. As a result, many of the examples and techniques throughout this book are not cited directly, but rather presented through the lens of my personal observations.
In preparing this second edition, I show how the strategies and techniques presented in this book are just as relevant in colleges and universities as they are in K–12 settings. While the five strategies are equally applicable to college-aged students (and, indeed, to adult learning), the ways in which they are implemented do need to be adapted, and in this second edition, I provide a number of examples of practical techniques for doing formative assessment in higher education, and especially in lecture settings.
Additionally in this second edition, I have obviously updated many of the research studies, particularly those related to the changing nature of the working environment. I have also updated the research evidence on the various ideas that have been proposed for improving schools—and while the evidence has changed, the conclusions have not. First, this updated evidence continues to indicate that most current methods of school improvement won’t help improve schools much. Second, it indicates that the power of classroom formative assessment to improve students’ learning is incredibly strong, with evidence from all over the world showing that not only does classroom formative assessment work, but it is manageable in ordinary classrooms, without extra resources. I hope that this book convinces every reader about the impact that formative assessment can have on student achievement and provides some guidance about how best to begin the difficult, challenging, but worthwhile task of applying research to practice.
chapter 1
Why Educational Achievement Matters
Educational achievement matters—more now than at any time in the past. It matters for individuals, and it matters for society. For individuals, higher levels of education mean higher earnings, better health, and increased life span. For society, higher levels of education mean lower health care costs, lower criminal justice costs, and increased economic growth. In this chapter, we will explore why education and educational achievement are vital to the prosperity of every nation and why the vast majority of attempts by policymakers to improve the achievement of school students have failed. We will then discuss three generations of school effectiveness research, the impact of teacher quality, and research-proven ways to increase teacher quality.
The Increasing Importance of Educational Achievement
Education has always been important, but it has never been as important as it is now. In 1979, the median salary of those with bachelor’s degrees was $30,000 higher than the median salary of those with a high school diploma or GED (in constant 2012 dollars). By 2012, the annual earnings gap had widened to over $58,000 (Autor, 2014).
Higher levels of education are also associated with better health; people with more education are less susceptible to a whole range of diseases, including cancer, and are less likely to have a significant period of disability toward the end of their lives (Jagger et al., 2007). No doubt this is partly due to lifestyle choices, such as smoking, but it is also due in part to the kinds of work that are available to those with limited education. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2010), approximately 75 percent of American adults who did not complete high school say they are in good health, compared with 95 percent of those with college degrees.
Perhaps more surprisingly, people with more education live longer. Between 1915 and 1939, at least thirty states changed their child labor laws and periods of compulsory schooling. As a result, a number of students were required to attend school for one more year than children in other states. By looking at the life spans of those who had been required to attend an extra year of school, Adriana Lleras-Muney (2005) estimates that each additional year of schooling adds 1.7 years to one’s life. These are high stakes indeed.
Educational achievement also matters for society. Henry Levin and his colleagues at Columbia University estimate that preventing one high school dropout produces a net benefit to society of $209,000 (Levin, Belfield, Muennig, & Rouse, 2007). The main components of this total are:
• $139,000 in extra taxes the individual would pay because he or she would be earning more money
• $40,500 in reduced health care costs, partly because the individual would be healthier, as noted previously, but also partly because he or she would be more likely to get health benefits from an employer and, therefore, be less dependent on public assistance
• $26,600 in reduced criminal justice costs (largely because the individual would be less likely to be incarcerated)
With higher levels of education, the U.S. economy will also grow faster. Using data from OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and a variety of other sources, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann (2015) examine the impact of increased achievement on economic growth. They estimate that if educators could raise the scores of American fifteen-year-olds on the triennial PISA tests by twenty-five points—the improvement that Poland made over a period of ten years—then by 2095, the U.S. economy would be 30 percent larger than it would otherwise be. And if American fifteen-year-olds could achieve a level of reading and mathematics that allowed them to participate effectively in modern society (defined by a score of 420 on PISA as compared with the international average of 500), the U.S. economy would grow by an extra $30 trillion (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2015).
The reason that higher levels of education are so valuable is because employers’ educational demands are increasing steadily, nowhere more so than in manufacturing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016), seventeen million Americans worked in manufacturing in 2000. Ten years later, the figure was less than twelve million. This means that in the first decade of the 21st century, the U.S. economy lost 2,700 manufacturing jobs every day. It is common to hear people say, “We don’t make stuff in America anymore,” but the sentiment is wrong. It turns out that more goods were manufactured in the United States in 2016 than at any other point in its history, surpassing the previous peak reached in 2008 (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, n.d.). The United States makes more stuff than it has ever made before. It just doesn’t use so many humans to do it—and that’s a good thing. Across all U.S. manufacturing, between 2002 and 2015, manufacturing output per hour of labor went up by 47 percent (Levinson, 2016). Compared to the heyday of American manufacturing, the average American worker employed in manufacturing in 2016 is more than six times as productive per hour as a worker in 1950. The reason that American workers are so much more productive is because they can work with more sophisticated technology, but this means that modern workers need higher levels of skill. Almost half of the manufacturing jobs that did not require a high school diploma in 2000