Education EDU 530 Week 2 Assignment

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Chapter 12

Formative Assessment

Chief Chapter Outcome

An understanding of research-ratified formative assessment’s essence sufficient for identifying teachers’ proper and improper implementations of this instructionally powerful assessment strategy

Learning Objectives

12.1 Distinguish the characteristics of formative assessment and identify their proper and improper implementation.

12.2 Identify how learning progressions are employed in formative assessment, and describe how best to build them.

Suppose there were a really convincing collection of research evidence show- ing that a particular assessment-based instructional strategy helped students learn more, and learn it better. Suppose, further, that because this assessment-based instructional strategy helped students learn more and learn it better, teachers who used this research-supported strategy became demonstrably more successful.

Because both of those two suppositions are stone-cold true, wouldn’t it seem that most of today’s teachers would be using this assessment-based instructional strategy in their classrooms? Yet, currently, many teachers aren’t. In this chapter, you’ll discover why this might be.

Assessment That Transforms Teaching The assessment-based instructional strategy to be treated in this chapter is for- mative assessment, and you’ll learn what it is and what it isn’t. You’ll also learn why, when abundant evidence is at hand indicating that formative assessment

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works—and works well—this measurement strategy is not more widely employed by today’s teachers. See whether you can figure out—on your own—why far fewer teachers currently seem to be employing formative assessment than one might think. That’s right; regard the chapter as a condensed mystery novel in which your task is to understand what formative assessment is, discover how it can improve a teacher’s effectiveness, and then come up with an accurate answer to the following question: Why is formative assessment, a research-ratified instruc- tional strategy, not being used more widely in our schools?

Early on, however, I want to get my personal preference out there in plain view so you can interpret my chapter-chatter more accurately. I am a definite believer in formative assessment. I think research evidence aplenty exists show- ing us that formative assessment helps kids learn better. Based on this belief, I want to see formative assessment used more extensively in our schools. As you continue to read, whether you are an experienced teacher or a teacher in prep- aration, you’ll sometimes find me touting the merits of formative assessment. This is because I think formative assessment constitutes an awesomely effective classroom-assessment approach that all educators should be advocating.

What Is Formative Assessment? Let’s look at the definition of formative assessment and then poke briefly into this definition’s key elements:

Formative assessment is a planned process in which assessment-elicited evidence of students’ status is used by teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures, or by students to adjust their current learning tactics.

A process, not a test. Perhaps what’s most important in this definition is that formative assessment is a process rather than a test. Moreover, it is a planned pro- cess. So, during a teachers’ lounge conversation, if one of your colleagues were to describe a particular test as “a formative test,” you now know that, accord- ing to the previous definition, your colleague would be mistaken. Formative assessment is not a test but, instead, is a carefully conceived process wherein the results of assessments are used by teachers or students to improve what they are doing. The process of collecting such assessment-based evidence, and then using this evidence to make any needed adjustments, is at the very heart of the formative-assessment process. If you prefer, you can accurately think of formative assessment as an instructional strategy. It’s a strategy for using assessment-elicited evidence to enhance teachers’ instruction and to improve students’ learning. It is, most definitely, not a particular type of test.

As you will soon see, thoughtful planning needs to take place early in the formative- assessment process—a process that is definitely not a spur-of-the-moment undertaking. Teachers, of course, make on-the-spot changes all the time. For example, in the midst of what a teacher believes will be a lucid explanation of a particular concept, if the teacher sees that most students look

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totally confused, the teacher might sensibly make an instant decision to start the explanation over again, trying thereby to improve its clarity. Spontaneous instructional changes of this sort are fine, and they’ll often improve instruction. Such on-the-spot instructional changes should be encouraged. They just aren’t formative assessment. Formative assessment is a process requiring some serious up-front thinking by teachers if it is going to work as well as the research evidence says it can work.

TERMINOLOGICAL LINEAGE The “formative” part of the formative-assessment label traces its ancestry to a distinction first drawn by Scriven (1967) over half a century ago. Scriven’s sepa- ration of formative and summative assessment functions, however, was related to educational evaluation, not to assessment. As you will see, the gist of this measurement-related distinction has been retained when today’s educators con- trast formative and summative assessment. Scriven argued that summative evalua- tion took place when educators appraised the worth of a fully mature, completed instructional program such as a published collection of self-study history booklets. In contrast, formative evaluation occurred when educators appraised the worth of a yet malleable instructional program—for example, a set of instructional materials still in the tryout-and-revision stage of development. Summative evaluation is employed to inform go/no-go decisions about a program, whereas formative evalu- ation is used to make improvement decisions regarding a program. These ev aluation- related meanings of the adjectives formative and summative have carried over to today when those two labels are applied to the use of educational assessments

Summative assessment takes place when educators use measurement-based- evidence to inform decisions about instructional activities already completed, such as when statewide accountability tests are administered each spring to determine the instructional effectiveness of a state’s schools during the soon-to-be-completed school year. As another example of summative assessment, think of the final examination a teacher administers to her students, one key purpose of that exam being to help the teacher assign an appropriate grade to her students based on how much those students have learned during a semester or school year. The decision riding on results of the student’s performance on the final exam is not an instructional-improvement decision but, rather, a decision about what grades the teacher should dole out to her students.

In contrast to summative assessment, formative assessment focuses on improving the way teachers are teaching something and the way students are learning something. Formative assessment has a “make-better” measurement mission, whereas summative assessment tries to answer an oft-voiced “instruc- tional quality” question.

Although a given test may be employed in connection with a summative- assessment function, it is possible (if the test is properly crafted) for this very same test also to be used as part of the formative-assessment process. In other words, tests, all by themselves, are neither formative nor summative. It is the use to which

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a given test’s results are put that makes the assessment a part of the formative- assessment process or, instead, finds it contributing to a summative-assessment decision. Of course, if educators specifically build a test to fulfill a specific function, such as the improvement of a teacher’s instruction, then the test will more likely be suited for a formative-measurement mission than for a summative-measurement purpose. You’ll soon see examples of how to build tests so that they contribute optimally to the formative-assessment process.

ASSESSMENT-BASED EVIDENCE Getting back to the definition of formative assessment, a central feature of the formative-assessment process is the collection of evidence from students via some sort of assessment procedure. This evidence-gathering activity need not rely on formal exams such as paper-and-pencil tests or, these days, computer-presented tests. Although time-honored testing tactics are typically time-honored because, over time, they have worked well enough to be retained, you will soon be seeing several more innovative ways of collecting evidence regarding students’ mastery of certain skills or knowledge. The assessment-elicited evidence referred to in the definition of formative assessment can be obtained by a wide variety of assess- ment ploys, not merely traditional assessment procedures.

If you take a careful look at the definition of formative assessment, you’ll see that the evidence elicited by assessment procedures is used either by teachers to adjust their ongoing instruction, or by students to adjust their current learning tactics (the procedures students are using in an attempt to learn what they are supposed to be learning). Formative assessment, therefore, is a process involving teachers and/ or students—not merely teachers. Instructional adjustments are made by teachers regarding their ongoing—that is, current—instruction, not instruction aimed at a subsequent group of students. Similarly, the adjustments by students in how they’re trying to learn something are those adjustments that are made with respect to their current learning tactics, not those learning tactics to be used in next year’s or later classes. Formative assessment, although planned in advance, is a “right now” process focused on shaping up what’s currently being taught and learned.

It is not a silly idea, of course, for teachers to assess their current students at the close of instruction to see how well those students have learned, and then for those teachers to make changes in next year’s or next term’s instruction. No, making such changes represents instructional savvy. Indeed, the label often used these days to characterize educators’ use of test results and other information in their decision making is data-driven education. Although it is not equivalent to the formative-assessment process, data-driven education clearly focuses on decision-makers’ utilization of relevant evidence—including, of course, students’ test performances. Assessing the impact of this year’s instruction on students in order to make improvement-focused adjustments in next year’s instruction is a smart way for teachers to operate. But those make-better adjustments, if they do not center on a teacher’s current collection of students, are not part of the formative-assessment process.

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A DISTINCTIVE WAY OF THINKING ABOUT INSTRUCTION Definitions, even carefully crafted ones, often can’t capture the richness of what’s being defined. As you look again at the definition of formative assessment, what may not come through is that the formative-assessment process represents a decidedly distinctive instructional strategy, a strategy in which teachers and stu- dents routinely employ assessments to come up with the evidence to let them know whether adjustments are called for in what’s going on in class. Formative assessment is, at bottom, a strategy in which the most important decisions about instruction or learning are based on students’ current assessed achievement status. If you, as a teacher-in-training or an experienced teacher, decide to employ forma- tive assessment in your own classes, it is almost certain that you’ll end up thinking about instruction in a manner profoundly different from the way most teachers have traditionally conceived of teaching. Formative assessment can, indeed, trans- form the way a teacher teaches.

Is Formative Assessment the Same as “Assessment for Learning”? In the past several years, some educators have become excited about the potential instructional dividends of swapping a three-letter preposition for a two-letter preposition. You probably recognize that it’s difficult to imagine any sort of preposition-exchanging generating even a tiny bit of educational excitement but, surprisingly, it has.

What I am referring to is the notion of assessment for learning that’s being recommended, instead of the more traditional way of thinking about assessment— namely, assessment of learning. You see, when most educators thought about assessment in years past, those educators saw assessment chiefly as a way of figuring out how much their students have learned. Clearly, the time-honored way of regarding testing was to conceive of it as assessment of learning. But, increasingly, we find prominent instructional specialists argu- ing that if teachers are ever to get the most instructional mileage out of their classroom testing, then the way to regard such testing is to view it as a vehicle to enhance instructional effectiveness or, with only a simple preposition-flip, to view it as assessment for learning.

Incidentally, assessment for learning is not supposed to replace all instances of assessment of learning. There are many situations in education when we really do want to find out what kids know and what they don’t know. That’s assess- ment of learning, and it’s not a bad thing. However, there should be many more occasions when assessment for learning should dominate an instructional scene. But before getting into some of the ways in which assessment for learning can be installed in a teacher’s classroom, let’s clarify where this feisty little phrase came from in the first place.

In the United States, the expression “assessment for learning” is often mis- takenly attributed to Richard Stiggins (2007) or to Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam

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(1998a), even though all three of these individuals always deny paternity regard- ing their fathering of the phrase. Because Dylan Wiliam is an able colleague and a good friend, and because he is associated with the Assessment Reform Group in England, where many people think the phrase emerged, I asked Dylan if he would be willing to sleuth out the origin of assessment for learning. (Sherlock Holmes, after all, was British.) Dylan agreed, and what he came up with you’ll find in the following paragraph.

The earliest use of the phrase “assessment for learning” appears to have been in a paper presented by a Brit, Mary James (1992), at a New Orleans conference of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Three years later, the phrase was used by Ruth Sutton of England as the title of a book she wrote (Sutton, 1995). However, the first explicit contrast of assessment for learning with assessment of learning seems to have occurred in the third edition of a book by Gipps and Stobart (1997) where their first chapter is titled “Assessment of Learn- ing” and their second chapter is titled “Assessment for Learning.” This preposi- tional distinction was brought to a wider audience two years later by England’s Assessment Reform Group in a guide for policymakers (Broadfoot et al., 1999).

So, thanks to Dylan’s dogged Sherlocking, we now have an idea where this fine formulation came from. It is apparent that most, if not all, of the early think- ing on this issue came to the United States from Great Britain. Thus, in addition to the debt we owe the Brits for tea, scones, and the Beatles, we now have something in the assessment realm for which we should all be grateful.

For all practical purposes, the phrases formative assessment and assessment for learning can be seen as essentially interchangeable. However, not everyone who employs either one of these two descriptors always does so properly. As you’ll see in a moment, the research evidence supporting the use of formative assessment is compelling. But that evidence does not support any old approach that someone decides to label as formative assessment, assessment for learning, or my Aunt Agnes’s way of teaching and testing.

Regrettably, we have found test publishers hawking all sorts of assessment products using the label “formative assessment.” Lorrie Shepard, a leading U.S. assessment expert, became particularly vexed with what she regarded as test ven- dors’ corruption, for marketing purposes, of an otherwise powerful assessment concept. As Shepard (2006) points out,

The research-based concept of formative assessment, closely grounded in classroom instructional processes, has been taken over (hijacked) by commercial test publishers and used instead to refer to formal testing systems called benchmark or interim assessment systems. (p. 5)

What Formative Assessment Isn’t As you look back at the definition of formative assessment, you can discern that some applications of educational assessment would obviously not satisfy the definition’s requirements. For instance, when annual accountability tests are

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administered at the close of a school year to evaluate a state’s schools, this would clearly not be an instance of formative assessment.

And you’ve already learned that a test itself is not formative assessment. Tests are used to collect information that can lead teachers or students to adjust what they are currently doing. But tests, all by themselves, are not formative assessment.

You’ve also seen that formative assessment is a planned process, not a collec- tion of off-the-cuff alterations in what’s going on in class. Although teachers make instant, unplanned changes in their instructional activities, such changes do not make what’s going on formative assessment. Careful thought must be given to what sorts of changes might be made, what sorts of evidence might be collected related to those changes, and what kinds of assessment devices might be used to secure this evidence. Don’t let a colleague tell you, “I already use formative assessment because I can tell from my students’ comments and their facial expres- sions whether I need to make any instructional adjustments.” Such adjustments, though frequently informative to a teacher, simply aren’t formative assessment.

Moreover, as you saw earlier from Shepard’s comment, formative assessment is most definitely not what commercial companies happen to call their products. As she noted, some vendors are now peddling assessment materials they describe by using labels such as interim assessments and benchmark assessments. Other vendors are calling the very same types of tests “formative.” Commercial compa- nies, of course, can call their products pretty much what they want to—barring violations of registered trademarks. But just because a commercial product is called formative assessment by vendors, or even by a group of well-intentioned educators who have built their own test, this mislabeling does not make that prod- uct automatically mesh with the kind of empirical research evidence undergirding the success of the formative-assessment process.

When does a teacher use formative assessment? Is it a once-in-a-while activity or an every-single-minute activity? Well, different educators may have different answers to such questions, but most teachers will use the formative-assessment process selectively. To be blunt, properly conceived formative assessment demands a heap of hard thinking on the teacher’s part, not to mention the neces- sary collection of assessment evidence from students. Formative assessment has the clear potential to prove burdensome to teachers and, therefore, to dissuade them from using it. But, as you’ll soon see, formative assessment helps students learn. If it’s not used, then students will be instructionally short-changed. Accord- ingly, teachers should use formative assessment judiciously—not constantly—as they promote students’ mastery of truly significant curricular aims.

The phrase that concluded the previous paragraph, namely, “truly significant curricular aims,” captures a concept definitely warranting a second look. You see, anyone is mistaken who thinks that formative assessment is nothing more than tossing a few along-the-way assessments (typically tests) into a lengthy instruc- tional sequence, then being guided instructionally by students’ performanances on such tests. More realistically, teachers who are successful formative evaluators

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often need to devote some heavy-duty curricular thinking when they conceptual- ize how they hope formative assessment will have the most—and best—impact on their students. Thus, in addition to sorting out which curricular aims to tackle formatively, and which to address more routinely, a formative-assessment devo- tee needs to make certain that all the wrinkles during the formative-assessment process have been smoothed and skillfully implemented.

In a few pages, you will read about a substantial review by two British schol- ars of many empirical investigations which, given the caliber of the research studies being reviewed, is routinely regarded as the chief research evidence sup- porting formative assessment’s effectiveness. Yet, despite those investigations’ contributions to the support of formative assessment’s instructional dividends, a careful re-look at the key features of this oft-cited review (now more than two decades old) suggests that much more has been learned regarding how to make formative assessments even more potent. There is, for example, need for en route assessments capable of collecting evidence that will lead to suitable instructional adjustments by teachers or students. Moreover, the en route tests themselves could surely be improved. Indeed, with more resources and planning, formative assessment can be carried out even more effectively than reported over the years. We have learned how to profit instructionally from the basic strategy of forma- tive assessment; now we need to sharpen our familiarity with all aspects of the formative-assessment process.

What a judicious use of formative assessment means, in practice, is that teach- ers will typically be using the formative-assessment process as they pursue stu- dents’ attainment of really challenging outcomes. Such outcomes, because they tend to be dependent on higher-order cognitive competencies, typically take some time to teach, perhaps several weeks or even a full semester or school year. It just doesn’t make much sense for teachers to direct the powerful formative-assessment process at a student’s mastery of, say, a set of memorized information that can be taught successfully in a couple of days. This is not a knock on the importance of students’ acquisition of knowledge. Possession of knowledge is a tremendous accomplishment for a student. But more often than not, one’s knowledge is then employed in the application of higher-order cognitive skills. Because such skills typically require a hefty hunk of time to attain, formative assessment often works best when it is employed by teachers as they promote their students’ mastery of these really significant curricular aims.

Research Supporting Formative Assessment Certain actions should be taken whether or not there is research evidence support- ing those actions. Parents should protect their children even if they have not read a definitive research-rooted article in Pediatrics or other journals that attest to the

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wisdom of a particular protective action. Similarly, we hold the door open for an overloaded supermarket shopper because it’s the proper thing to do—despite our not having reviewed empirical evidence supporting the positive consequences of such door-opening behavior. Common sense, not research evidence, often inclines people to do the right thing.

Let’s think for a moment about formative assessment, an approach to instructional decision making in which a teacher uses along-the-way assess- ment evidence from students as a guide to whether any instructional adjust- ments are needed. Formative assessment is an instructional strategy that, on the face of it, makes a saucepan full of sense. Because teachers are human beings, and human beings often make mistakes, formative assessment simply asks a teacher to monitor students’ progress to see whether the teacher’s instruc- tional decisions seem to be sensible ones. Thus, if instructional changes seem needed, those changes can be made. Teachers invariably try to “get it right the first time.” But, of course, many times an original instructional design will be substantially less than perfect. By monitoring students’ status to see how the instruction is working, less-than-wonderful instruction can be altered so it becomes more wonderful. Similarly, if students are given evidence regarding their own progress in learning whatever they’re supposed to be learning, then those students can determine whether their learning tactics need to be adjusted. In almost any sort of instructional setting, formative assessment would make sense even if not one dollop of empirical research were at hand to support its effectiveness.

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But such research has, in fact, been carried out. It’s much more than a dollop, and it’s quite persuasive. So, in addition to a common-sense rationale supporting formative assessment as a classroom instructional strategy, teachers now have ample empirical evidence on hand to confirm the commonsensical.

The Black and Wiliam Research Review Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam are two British researchers who, in 1998, published a remarkably influential review of almost 10 years’ worth of empirical research dealing with classroom assessment (Black and Wiliam, 1998a). “Assessment and Classroom Learning,” their rather technical review, appeared in the March 1998 issue of the journal Assessment in Education and, frankly, attracted only modest attention among U.S. educators. However, in October of the same year, these two authors published a follow-up article in the more widely read Phi Delta Kappan (Black and Wiliam, 1998b) not only summarizing their earlier review of research evidence but also describing policy implications of that evidence. In contrast to the March article’s almost nonexistent impact on the thinking of American edu- cators, the October essay in the Kappan garnered considerable attention. It was Black and Wiliam’s March review of classroom-assessment research, however, that provided the chief empirical underpinnings of today’s formative assessment. As a consequence, let’s first look at what these two British researchers concluded from their analyses.

The following quotation is, for all current teachers and all prospective teach- ers, worth at least two or three (slow and thoughtful) readings:

The research reported here shows conclusively that formative assess- ment does improve learning. (Black & Wiliam, 1998a, p. 61)

Are those learning improvements something substantial or something tri- fling? Well, Black and Wiliam (1998a) concluded that the student gains in learning triggered by formative assessment were “amongst the largest ever reported for educational interventions” (p. 61)! Let’s look at this last conclusion for a moment. First off, we need to take seriously any assertion containing the term amongst. (Even in print, British people can seem so convincingly credible.) But, more important, please note that formative assessment, when used by teachers in their classrooms, is capable of causing student gains as great as any ever reported for educational interventions. We are not talking here about tiny improvements in kid learning. No, on the contrary, these are whopping gains that formative assessment can bring about in students’ achievement.

One conclusion reached by Black and Wiliam that makes their work espe- cially relevant to teachers’ day-to-day instruction is their finding that formative assessment is truly robust. In other words, if formative assessment is installed by teachers, it is nearly certain to work. As Black and Wiliam observe, “Significant gains can be achieved by many different routes, and initiatives here are not likely to fail through neglect of delicate and subtle features” (1998a, p. 61). In their

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review, Black and Wiliam supply numerous examples of research investigations in which it is apparent that formative assessment makes a meaningful contribu- tion to students’ learning. Sometimes the studies being reviewed focused on teachers’ adjustments of their instruction; sometimes the reviewed reports dealt with students’ adjustments of their own learning tactics. As Black and Wiliam observe,

[T]he consistent feature across the variety of these examples is that they all show that attention to formative assessment can lead to significant learning gains. Although there is no guarantee that it will do so irrespec- tive of the context and the particular approach adopted, we have not come across any report of negative effects following . . . an enhancement of formative practice. (1998a, p. 17)

But even though there was some interest in the 1998 Kappan summary of the March 1998 research review, it was not until the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that U.S. educators turned their attention seriously to the instructional recommendations provided by these two British scholars. This was because NCLB’s 2002 enactment called for U.S. educators to boost students’ scores on accountability tests substantially, moving toward a point where, in 2014, all students in U.S. public schools would achieve “proficient or better” scores on NCLB-required state exams. Faced with this nontrivial challenge, many American educators recalled the 1998 Kappan article, which had pointed out that formative assessment could boost students’ achievement—not just a little, but a lot!

Well, it did not require a huge inferential leap for astute U.S. educators to conclude that if students’ in-classroom learning could be improved by forma- tive assessment, why would not those same improvements splash over onto stu- dents’ performances on NCLB accountability tests? And this ushered in what soon became a sometimes frenzied advocacy of formative assessment by many educational leaders. Formative assessment was being touted as an NCLB salva- tion strategy. Numerous educational administrators really believed that if they could only get enough of their teachers to use formative assessment (“whatever this ‘formative assessment’ is”), then students’ scores on NCLB tests would go up sufficiently for educators to dodge NCLB failure.

Wrapping up this quick look at the empirical evidence underlying forma- tive assessment, it is difficult to consider the Black and Wiliam synthesis of classroom-assessment research without concluding that the formative- assessment process represents a particularly potent way for assessment to bolster the caliber of teachers’ instruction. More recently, Wiliam reported that “Five reviews of the research in this area synthesized a total of more than 4000 research studies undertaken during the last 40 years. The conclusion was clear: When imple- mented well, formative assessment can effectively double the speed of student learning” (Wiliam, 2007/2008). Let’s now look at the fundamental framework around which this speed-doubling assessment-rooted instructional process can be carried out.

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Learning Progressions as Frameworks We can begin by turning to what some readers might regard as a topic more suited for a book about instruction than a book about assessment. But don’t forget that the text you’re currently reading is about classroom assessment, and the major activity that goes on in classrooms is instruction. Indeed, it is because formative assessment is an assessment-based way of making a teacher’s instruction better that you’ll find the upcoming topics particularly pertinent to what might go on in your own classroom.

What Is a Learning Progression? You’ve seen that formative assessment is basically a process in which assessment evidence is used by teachers or students to adjust what they are doing. Well, when is this assessment evidence to be collected? Clearly, teachers can’t be collecting assessment evidence from kids every few minutes. After all, the really big job facing teachers is to teach students, not test students. At what points, then, during an instructional sequence should students be assessed so that teachers (or the students themselves) can decide whether adjustments (in either teaching or test- ing tactics) are in order? The answer to this significant question revolves around teachers’ reliance on a learning progression. Here’s what a learning progression is:

A learning progression is a sequenced set of building blocks—that is, subskills or bodies of enabling knowledge—that it is thought students must master en route to mastering a more remote, target curricular aim.

In plain language, a learning progression is an ordered sequence of the stuff that a student must learn in order to achieve a significant curricular outcome. Because the construction of a learning progression requires an expenditure of time and energy from a teacher, the “significant curricular outcome” being sought will typically deal with students’ mastery of a high-level cognitive skill, the kind of skill that is apt to take a meaningful amount of time to teach. Examples of such skills include a student’s ability to (1) design a defensible scientific investigation, (2) write a powerful persuasive essay, or (3) select and compute the most effective statistical indicators to accurately represent a set of empirical data. Thus, the use of learning progressions and, in truth, the use of the formative-assessment process itself, is often focused on the promotion of significant curricular aims.

Let’s briefly consider the key components of the preceding definition of a learn- ing progression. First off, the purpose of a learning progression is to identify what students need to master on their way to mastering a more remote, target curricular aim. This aim, as already noted, is usually a higher-order cognitive skill. So that students can master such a target curricular aim, they will almost always first need to master one or more lesser curricular aims. These lesser aims are called building blocks, and they consist of either bodies of enabling knowledge or cognitive subskills.

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To illustrate, if the target curricular aim being sought were for students to be able to write a clear expository (explanatory) essay, then one building block might be for the student to know (that is, to have memorized) the important mechani- cal conventions of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Knowing and adhering to those conventions, the student is likely to write a clearer essay than one laden with errors in spelling, punctuation, or grammar. Thus, the student’s knowledge of mechanical conventions would be a single enabling knowledge building block in a learning progression that’s aimed at promoting the student’s skill in writing expository essays.

Another building block in this instance might be a cognitive subskill. Such a subskill could be the student’s ability to effectively organize the information to be presented in an expository essay so that the essay’s readers would most readily understand what was being explained. The appropriate organization of an essay’s content, then, might be a second building block for this learning progression.

One of the most common mistakes teachers make in developing a learning progression is to include too many building blocks. Indeed, the more conver- sant a teacher becomes with the subskills and knowledge that a student must possess to master a target curricular aim, the greater the teacher’s tendency to toss in more and more building blocks. This is surely understandable, for the more we know about something, the more attentive we become to that something’s nuances. Yet, as you will soon see, students’ mastery of each build- ing block in a learning progression must be assessed. With too many building blocks in a learning progression, this assessment obligation can quickly get out of hand. It makes more sense to focus on a modest number of building blocks that are truly requisite for a student’s mastery of the target curricular aim than to focus on a larger number of building blocks, some of which are arguably requisite. In learning progressions, as in many realms of life, less is almost always more.

Finally, the building blocks in a learning progression should be sequenced in the order in which it is believed students can most effectively master those build- ing blocks on their way to mastering the target curricular aim. This sequence of building blocks is the one that the persons who are developing a learning progres- sion believe is the most sensible. Although there are several intuitively reasonable guidelines for this sequencing of building blocks, such as “transmit knowledge before asking students to apply such knowledge,” the actual sequence of build- ing blocks in a learning progression is up to the persons who are building the progression. Here’s where a teacher’s pedagogical prowess comes into play, for a teacher must determine the optimal order in which students should try to master knowledge and subskills along their way to mastery.

Figure 12.1 shows one way in which a learning progression can be repre- sented graphically. Note that, in this instance, the target curricular aim is rep- resented by a rectangle, the two bodies of enabling knowledge are signified by squares, and the solo requisite subskill is depicted by a circle. If you generate your own learning progressions, of course, you can employ any symbols that suit you.

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Learning progressions can be displayed horizontally as well as vertically. Again, graphical representations are up to those who are trying to represent the learning progression. But most educators report that having access to some sort of graphi- cal depiction of a learning progression helps them more easily grasp the relation- ships among the progression’s building blocks and its target curricular aim.

Recalling that formative assessment rests on the use of assessment-elicited evidence by teachers (or students) to make adjustment decisions, when teachers identify the key building blocks that they believe their students must master en route to the attainment of a target curricular aim, those teachers have thereby determined when to assess their students. If every building block is regarded as genuinely requisite for the student’s advancement toward mastery of a curricular aim, then it is apparent that a teacher will need to see whether each building block has, in fact, been mastered. The formative-assessment process revolves around

Target Curricular Aim

Z

Subskill A

Enabling Knowledge

B

Enabling Knowledge

A

Figure 12.1 GrapTiaal Depiation os a typiaal ­earninn pronression

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assessments and the adjustment decisions associated with every building block in a learning progression. Clearly, this is why learning progressions are regarded as the guiding framework for formative assessment.

Teachers should know, however, that a learning progression is not unerringly accurate. In few instances are we able to send learning progressions through the tryout-and-revision cycles that would empirically confirm their accuracy. Rather, learning progressions usually represent the best estimate that educators can make about what things students must master on their way to mastery of a significant curricular aim—and about what constitutes a sensible instructional sequence for those things. Most learning progressions undergo a good many modifications as they are developed and as they are used. Finally, a particular learning progression is unlikely to work well for all students. Some students learn in different, seem- ingly mysterious ways. A learning progression that might function marvelously for most students will often flop for a few. For those few students, meaningful modifications in “their” learning progression will definitely be needed.

Building a Learning Progression How does a teacher, or a group of teachers, build a learning progression? In a moment, you will be presented with a four-step process that you might try when doing so. But if you do, then you’ll need to invoke not only your emerging mea- surement moxie, but also your teaching talents. This is because the decisions made regarding the creation of a formative assessment’s learning progres- sion will usually determine the success or failure of a given application of the formative-assessment process. More specifically, because a learning progression’s building blocks are the things that must be learned by students, then near the close of instruction for each building block, students’ status regarding the building block must be assessed. This means that the grain size of the target curricular aim, as well as the grain size of the learning progression’s building blocks, should be “just right.” The term grain size refers to the scope of a curricular aim or building block. Large grain-size building blocks are broader and take more time to teach. Large grain-size building blocks sometimes subsume smaller chunks of knowledge or lesser subskills.

Because too many building blocks can clutter up the formative-assessment process so that it becomes too time-consuming to use, the builders of learning progressions must strive to identify fairly large grain-size building blocks so that a learning progression doesn’t contain more building blocks than the teacher has the energy to consider. At the same time, those larger grain-size building blocks should not contain such a heterogeneous bundle of skills and knowledge that what’s in a building block is too scattered to be approached instructionally. Yes, the builders of learning progressions need to know not only their testing basics, but also their teaching basics.

Here, then, are four steps you might consider following in the creation of a learning progression to serve as the formative-assessment framework for a fairly

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significant target curricular aim—typically a powerful cognitive skill that your students are supposed to master.

Step 1: Acquire a thorough understanding of the target curricular aim. Don’t even think about building a learning progression unless you first arrive at a fuzz-free fix about the nature of the target curricular aim itself. You can’t come up with appropriate building blocks unless you com- pletely comprehend the essence of the outcome being sought. One of the best ways to understand the nature of that target curricular aim is to become familiar with the assessment procedure (or procedures) to be employed in measuring students’ mastery of the aim. If you are the person who will build this assessment procedure (or have already built it), then you surely have a good idea what the target curricular aim is. If, however, others have built the end-of-instruction assessment(s), be sure you understand it (them) completely. Tests “operationalize” cur- ricular aims—that is, tests constitute the operations that students must display in order to show us the degree to which they’ve mastered a curricular aim.

Step 2: Identify all requisite precursory subskills and bodies of enabling knowledge. This second step is really the toughest of our four-step process. In this second step, you need to think through what students really must know and be able to do if they are going to be successful in mastering the target curricular aim. The most influential word in this second step is requisite. This second step is an effort to isolate all “must-know” subskills and knowledge. This second step is not a time to identify “nice-to-know” subskills and knowledge. To keep the number of building blocks man- ageable, it is sometimes necessary for several lesser subskills or bodies of enabling knowledge to be coalesced into larger, yet teachable grain sizes. But the focus in this second step must be the isolation of what is truly necessary for students to have mastered on their way to mastery of the target curricular aim.

Step 3: Determine the measurability of each preliminarily identified building block. So far, you will have identified—in Step 2—the building blocks you deem to be necessary precursors to a student’s mastery of the target curricular aim. In this third step, you must make certain that you can realistically collect evidence regarding students’ mastery of each build- ing block. The heart of the formative-assessment process is to find out how students are progressing with respect to each building block, and this means measuring students’ status regarding all the building blocks in the learning progression. Although the assessments of students’ building-block status must be carefully conceived, those assessments need not be formal, elaborate, “big deal” tests. Frequently, for exam- ple, teachers can get a sufficiently accurate fix (for making adjustment decisions) by using mini-quizzes of only a few binary-choice items or,

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perhaps, by employing a short-answer essay item. But, if you can’t—in a practical manner—assess students’ mastery of each building block, then you ought to dump the unmeasurable ones.

Step 4: Arrange all the building blocks in an instructionally sensible sequence. This final step calls for you to think through what sort of sequence makes the most sense from an instructional perspective and then place the learning progression’s building blocks in that order. As noted before, teachers rarely have time to try these sequences out to make sure a given sequence is working properly, and it is often necessary to rear- range the sequences after the learning progression has been used a time or two. However, this is the point at which a teacher’s instruc- tional acumen is needed. Simply sequence the learning progression’s building blocks in the order in which a teacher should most effectively tackle them.

Because formative assessment is a planned process in which students are periodically assessed and, if necessary, adjustments are made, the importance of learning progressions cannot be overestimated. If you decide to employ forma- tive assessment in your own classes, any time that you devote to generating a defensible learning progression, especially for your most significant curricular aims, will be time well spent.

In certain other nations—for instance, Australia and New Zealand—many educators think of learning progressions as much more elongated sequences of students’ likely learning chains. For example, a group of educators might describe a step-by-step progression of skills and knowledge that a student would typically acquire, over the course of several years, en route to a sophisticated mastery of a given subject. Such long-term views of learning progressions can be useful to teachers, particularly in devising the kinds of shorter-duration learning progres- sions described in this chapter.

Formative Assessment: A Means-Ends Game So far, in this chapter’s look at formative assessment, we’ve considered what formative assessment is, its research base, and the role of learning progressions as frameworks for formative assessment. Happily, during the past decade, a host of different measurement and/or instructional specialists have written an array of readable and practical step-by-step approaches to the planning and delivery of first-rate formative assessment. These books are cited in the references section at the close of this chapter. They offer you a considerable range of strategies and tactics for thinking about and implementing the formative-assessment process.

One of the most encouraging conclusions emerging from Black and Wiliam’s (1998a) influential review of classroom-assessment studies is that the formative-assessment process is remarkably robust. That is, a teacher who uses it is likely to boost students’ learning, irrespective of the way in which the teacher

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employs formative assessment. As long as the teacher focuses on the collection of assessment evidence from students so that, based on such evidence, either the teacher or the teacher’s students can make decisions about adjusting what they’re doing, then the odds are that formative assessment will work.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that evidence galore now exists under- girding the effectiveness of the formative-assessment process. After all, what is formative assessment other than an instantiation of means-ends thinking? In truth, means-ends thinking (or, if you prefer, ends-means thinking) has surely been around ever since humans first trod the earth. It has been around because it works. Formative assessment is merely means-ends thinking in classrooms.

In traditional means-ends strategies unrelated to education, someone—or some group—identifies an outcome to be sought—for instance, reduction in the temperature of the water in a lake with much tourist traffic where, in recent years, many of the lake’s animals and fish have perished because of atypically high lake temperatures. Okay, there’s the sought-for end of our brief illustration—cooling the lake water’s temperature. Now, the question turns to what means we should use to successfully achieve our cool-the-lake end. Well, one approach might be to divert several cold-water mountain streams into the lake via water pipes a full yard in diameter. At a substantial cost, two small streams are then diverted so that much of their water enters the lake—with the obvious intention of lowering the lake’s tem- perature. After one year of implementing this tactic, the lake’s temperature shows a substantial decrease. Evidence of the desired end’s achievement was collected by using the temperature-determining measures that had been chosen earlier.

But not all means-ends forays end so smilingly. Suppose, for example, that despite the water diversion scheme described previously, no meaningful lower- ing of the lake’s temperature was seen. The chosen means did not lead to the end that had been sought. Those in charge of the project would then select another tactic (that is, a different means), still hoping to achieve a bit of lake cooling. And again, subsequently determining the temperature of the lake would be the best way to find out whether the new set of means was more successful than those previously tried, but unsuccessful, means. Just as in lake cooling, we carry out similar means-ends approaches, often subconsciously, in our everyday lives because ends-means thinking works. Why wouldn’t we apply this approach to assessment?

And this is precisely the reason why the formative-assessment process has been shown to be so potent in our schools. After having identified an important curricular goal to be promoted for a group of students—that is, an educational end—teachers then consider how best to instruct their students so that the target goal will be achieved. Along the way, as the instruction is taking place, teachers collect assessment-elicited evidence from students to determine the degree to which what’s going on instructionally is working. If evidence from en route assess- ments indicates that students are learning what they are supposed to be learning, then no major alterations in instruction are needed. However, if the results of en route assessments (the tests linked to building blocks) indicate that inadequate

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progress is occurring in students’ learning, then it seems patently appropriate for the teacher to install serious adjustments in the previously selected instructional means. Application of a means-ends strategy has indicated that the chosen means were not getting the instructional job done. It is clearly time for teachers and/or students to make adjustments in the means being implemented.

A Formative Assessor’s Typical Decisions Thus far in the chapter, we have approached formative assessments chiefly from a “big steps” conceptual perspective. Nevertheless, it is always worthwhile to remember that sometimes a string of separate, solo decisions can crowd out someone’s “big picture” overall understanding of a multipart process. Accord- ingly, you’ll now be given a bare-bones set of illustrative decisions that are typi- cally required of a classroom teacher who’s using formative assessment. The hope in asking you to tussle with these often required decisions is that—when listed in sequential order—a string of such decisions can provide a meaningful way to impose sensible order on one of the most potent, instructionally focused assess- ment processes. Although there is no “mandatory” sequence in which a teacher must generate or implement the formative-assessment process, following are sev- eral of the most frequent decisions that will need to be made when carrying out formative assessment.

1. Choose a suitable formative-assessment locus. First, and perhaps most im- portant overall, a teacher must select the outcome and estimate its duration that will feature a formative-assessment approach. The chosen outcome, and its likely instructional duration—when compared with alternative outcomes— should be regarded as clearly suitable for a formative- assessment–rooted instructional approach.

2. Build a learning progression or, if such progressions are at hand, select the one you will use. Think through, from a patently instructional perspective, how best to sequence the intended learning progression’s order for the time required to administer, score, and relay those assessment performances to your students. This might lead to the compression or expansion of the en route assessments comprising the learning progression. Consider how each component of the learning progression should be assessed, that is, by tra- ditional selected- or constructed-response assessments or via more atypical assessment techniques.

3. Administer your assessments according to schedule, then provide stu- dents with their results. Care must be taken to draw only warranted inferences about what’s next instructionally based on evidence drawn from students’ performances. In addition, teacher and students must also struc- ture feedback activities so that they optimize the likelihood of students gaining insights from their performances on the learning progression’s en route tests.

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4. Decide periodically if any serious modifications to the learning progres- sion are needed. Because, in many instances, these learning progressions represent a teacher’s early-on best thinking about how to teach what’s to be assessed by a learning progression, frequent revisitations of the learning pro- gression’s acceptability are warranted. Familiarity with a learning progres- sion’s components often leads to resultant instructional insights.

5. Evaluate each learning progression’s quality at the close of its use. Because learning progressions intended to foster students’ mastery of a formative assessment’s intended outcomes are often less successful than teachers would prefer, teachers stand ready to make mild or serious changes in a learning progression or the assessments linked to it. Systematic documentation will aid those who use or re-use the progression.

The five-step illustration given above is most definitely not THE way to carry out the formative-assessment process. Rather, the example is intended to portray one way that teachers might carry out formative assessment in their classrooms. For example, a teacher might have more or fewer en route tests, could vary the length of those tests, or could carry out the collection of en route assessment data over a lengthy or an abbreviated period of time. Indeed, given the varied nature of the content involved, a remarkable array of en route assessments might be regarded as appropriate.

What is unchanging, however, is the use of along-the-way assessments in order for teachers (or students) to make data-based decisions if any changes in a learning progression’s en route assessments are needed. As indicated earlier in this chapter, the essence of a formative-assessment strategy is its use of one or more en route assessments to collect assessment-provided evidence bearing on the suitability of students’ learning. A review of the Black and Wiliam (1998a) analysis will make clear that a substantial variety of assessment tactics were incor- porated into their review. The essential feature of formative assessment, namely, a systematic reliance on students’ en route assessment evidence, however, was always present.

Why the Delay? At the beginning of this chapter, you were asked to figure out why formative assessment, an assessment-based instructional strategy boasting all sorts of research support, is not more widely used in our schools. Now it’s time to come up with an answer to that question. Why do you think we don’t cur- rently see formative assessment flourishing effectively in most of the nation’s classrooms?

There is no right answer to this important question, but we can identify sev- eral reasons why we seem to be slow in our nation’s implementation of formative assessment. Let’s see how these answers mesh with those you may have come up with on your own as you were reading the chapter.

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A Misunderstood Process One deterrent to our greater use of formative assessment is educators’ consider- able misunderstanding about the nature of formative assessment. Large numbers of educators think of formative assessment as a test, not a process. It’s tough to get substantial benefits in kid learning if teachers think some sort of magic-bullet test is going to help them transform a faulty instructional sequence into a terrific one. Another form of misunderstanding occurs when educators believe forma- tive assessment is intended to help only teachers adjust what they are up to, not to help students alter their learning tactics as well. The Black and Wiliam research review (1998a) makes it clear that if students are actively involved in the learning process, and are given the assessment data to manage their own learning tactics, those students will display achievements superior to those displayed by students who are not involved in the learning process and do not monitor their own ongo- ing progress. A misunderstood formative-assessment process is unlikely to be widely adopted, because those educational leaders who are encouraging teachers to employ formative assessment will end up advocating with imprecision that which they themselves do not understand well.

Experienced Teachers’ Intransigence Nor do most of the nation’s assessment companies help out in this regard. Many, but certainly not all, testing vendors have developed their own for-purchase

parent talr Suppose one of your better students, Mary Ruth Green, brings in a note from her parents, expressing concern that your classes seem to be organized to “teach to the test, not educate students.” Mr. and Mrs. Green ask you to call them at home so that, using their speaker phone, they can both discuss this concern with you.

If I were you, here’s what I’d say on the phone to Mary Ruth’s parents:

“Thanks for raising this issue. It’s an important concern, and because we all want what’s best for Mary Ruth, I’m pleased to be able to explain how we’re using tests in my class.

“Actually, I do use tests to influence my instruction. But the tests really only represent the skills and knowledge I’m trying to get Mary Ruth and her classmates to learn. I use the tests

to help me plan my instruction and to make an interpretation about whether students are mastering what the test represents. In this way, I’ll know whether more instruction is needed on particular topics.

“Please be assured that I am definitely not teaching to particular test items. All of the items on my tests, in fact, have never been seen before by the students. Yet, all of those items do reflect the knowledge and skills my class is supposed to promote for students.

“Remember also that half of Mary Ruth’s grade is based on the portfolio-assessment system we use. I think the portfolio work samples, when blended with the test results, give me an even better picture of my students’ progress.”

Now, how would you respond to Mr. and Mrs. Green?

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assessment products that they promote as the way to boost students’ scores on high-stakes accountability tests. Such companies have little interest in helping teachers understand that, according to the research evidence now at our disposal, it is formative assessment as an evidence-informed, classroom monitoring/adjustment process that has been shown to be effective—not a collection of prefabricated, off-the-shelf assessment systems labeled as formative. Thus, some self-interested assessment firms are contributing directly to misunderstandings about forma- tive assessment on the part of educators. Profit motives have meandered onto the range.

A second roadblock to educators’ greater use of formative assessment may be the inherent difficulty of getting people to change their ways. Many of today’s educators have been educating students for more than a few minutes. And dur- ing the years that those educators have been doing their jobs, they have adopted certain instructional behaviors that, in their estimation, work! Almost all teachers think what they’re doing helps their students. Otherwise, most teachers would not be doing those things. Now, because of most teachers’ firm beliefs that what they have been doing will benefit students, you can see how difficult it is to get those teachers to adopt something fundamentally different. So, another factor slowing down teachers’ acceptance of a research-supported classroom strategy that works might be, simply, human beings’ reluctance to abandon their estab- lished behaviors.

As indicated earlier, when formative assessment began being widely advo- cated based on the substantial amount of supportive evidence collected in Great Britain and beyond, a good many classroom teachers vowed to “give it a go,” that is, attempted to implement it with their own students. Unfortunately, in a good many instances, inadequate professional development was supplied so that many U.S. teachers were largely “going it alone,” hence often flopping in their serious-minded but seriously undersupported efforts to implement the essence of a formative assessment approach with their own students. Those less than lustrous efforts to expand the use of formative assessment can be seen in the reluctance of today’s teachers to give formative assessment another try. In almost choral unison, upon receiving an invitation to take part in a formative-assessment expansion effort, their declinational response is roughly, “Been there, done that, liked it not!”

Undetected Improvements Third, despite the fact that formative assessment can improve students’ achieve- ment, and improve it dramatically, this improved achievement may not show up on many external accountability tests. In Chapter 15 you will learn why this is so. But in a nutshell preview of that chapter’s message, certain kinds of exter- nal accountability tests are basically unable to accurately measure the quality of instruction that students receive. Insofar as this is true, teachers who might be doing a crackerjack instructional job by using formative assessment may discover that, despite what their classroom tests demonstrate is considerable improvement

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in their students’ achievement, those improvements simply don’t show up on the high-stakes tests being used in that locale to evaluate schools. Disillusioned with such results, some teachers understandably back away from using what seems to be an ineffectual formative-assessment process. After you read Chapter 15, you will see why this is so.

Actionability Finally, many teachers have bailed out on the formative-assessment pro- cess because their students’ performances on routine classroom tests—the ones given during the formative-assessment process—are not reported in a “ decision-friendly” actionability fashion.” If students’ test performances are reported at too fine-grained a level, such as item-by-item, teachers will be required to knit those results together so that instructional sense can be drawn from them. If, on the other hand, students’ tests are reported too generally, such as giving teachers several broad areas of performance, then teachers will be required to make inferences, sometimes mistaken, about students’ actual strengths and weak- nesses. What teachers need from the tests used during the formative-assessment process is “right-sized” performance reports from which teachers can derive read- ily implementable instructional next-steps.

These, then, are four likely reasons why formative assessment is not more widely employed in our schools: (1) misunderstandings about formative assess- ment, (2) teachers’ tendencies to resist altering their current conduct, (3) imple- mentation choices that tend to diminish the actionability of actually using students’ test performances, and (4) the failure of many external accountability tests to accurately mirror the improvements occurring in the classrooms of teach- ers who use formative assessment. You may, of course, arrive at other reasons why we are not currently surrounded by swarms of teachers who rely on formative assessment to deliver the best possible instruction to their students.

Whatever obstacles exist to the greater use of formative assessment, we need to overcome those impediments. We must do whatever is necessary so that forma- tive assessment will be used far more widely in our nation’s classrooms. Forma- tive assessment works, and it works to help students learn. Accordingly, we need much more of it.

What Do Classroom Teachers Really Need to Know About Formative Assessment? What a teacher really needs to know about formative assessment depends almost completely on what the teacher intends to do with formative assessment. If teach- ers don’t plan to use formative assessment in their own classrooms, then there’s

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much less that such teachers must know about it. A “non-user” teacher, however, should still know what formative assessment is—and what it isn’t. It’s especially important these days, even for non-using teachers, to understand the essential means-ends nature of formative assessment. This is because, as a member of a school’s faculty, such teachers can help forestall their colleagues’ sometimes unthinking adoption of commercial products that, though praised by those prod- ucts’ publishers, have essentially no evidence to support their use. If a non-user teacher has a general understanding of what the research basis underlying forma- tive assessment actually is, then research-free claims of effectiveness for commer- cial products can be contrasted with the kind of substantial empirical evidence that has now shown that classroom assessment, if used formatively, can benefit students. Summing up, even teachers who don’t intend to use formative assess- ment should know what it is, what it isn’t, and the nature of its research support.

On the other hand, if a teacher intends to actually use formative assessment, then what that teacher needs to know is substantially greater. For openers, a would-be user of formative assessment must obviously understand what forma- tive assessment is and what it isn’t. Any prospective user of formative assessment must surely grasp the means-ends nature of formative assessment as a process in which assessment-elicited evidence allows teachers to adjust their instruction and enables students to adjust their learning tactics—if such adjustments are warranted.

But WTat Does tTis have to Do eitT teaaTinn? Formative assessment is not the same thing as teaching. Rather, formative assessment is an assessment-rooted process capable of making teaching better. It may be useful for educators to think of formative assessment as a companion activity whose one and only raison d’être is to improve the quality of teaching. It does so by providing the assessment-based evidence that informs certain instructional decisions a teacher should make.

Accordingly, formative assessment must be a classroom-based process. Formative assessment doesn’t take place in a principal’s office or at a school district’s central offices. Formative assessment occurs in a particular classroom taught by a particular teacher, and it is based on assessment evidence collected from that teacher’s current students. To the extent that anyone tries to make formative assessment an activity occurring outside what goes on in a given teacher’s

classroom, those efforts really cannot be supported by the existing research base that so strongly undergirds the use of classroom-based formative assessment.

Teaching consists of the instructional activities a teacher chooses to employ, and those activities are chosen because of conscious decisions made by the teacher. One category of such instructional decisions can be accurately characterized as adjustment decisions—that is, decisions regarding whether preplanned instruction should be adjusted by a teacher and, if so, in what ways. Well, those adjustment decisions are precisely the ones that the formative-assessment process is intended to inform. If formative assessment is employed properly, teachers’ adjustment decisions will be better, and as a consequence, kids will be better educated.

What does formative assessment have to do with teaching? Everything!

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Teachers who intend to use formative assessment must be thoroughly con- versant with the structure of learning progressions, and with the role those pro- gressions play in the formative-assessment process. Unless a teacher is fortunate enough to stumble onto an already-developed learning progression for the same target curricular aim a teacher has chosen, then the teacher should be able to build a brand-new learning progression from scratch.

Chapter Summary Formative assessment was defined, at the begin- ning of this chapter, as a planned process in which assessment-elicited evidence of students’ status is used by teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures, or by students to adjust their current learning tactics. Because a teacher’s understanding of this conception of formative assessment is essential, considerable attention was given to describing the key components of the definition.

The second emphasis of the chapter was on the research evidence underlying the formative-assessment process. The Black and Wiliam (1998a) review of almost a decade’s worth of classroom-assessment investigations currently supplies the bulk of evidence usually called on to support the effectiveness of formative assess- ment. Based on 250 solid studies drawn from almost 700 such studies, Black and Wiliam con- cluded that the empirical evidence they studied “shows conclusively that formative assessment does improve learning.” Moreover, the improve- ments in students’ learning attributed to for- mative assessment were among the largest ever reported for educational interventions. Finally, Black and Wiliam pointed out that the formative-assessment process is so robust that it can be employed by teachers in diverse ways, yet still work. In the years following the 1998 review by Black and Wiliam, additional scientific evi- dence has only buttressed their findings.

Put differently, no barge full of research studies has arrived to discredit the substantial instructional virtues of the formative-assessment process. Nonetheless, careful scrutiny of teachers’

use of this strategy reveals, regrettably, that it sim- ply is not being used in as many classrooms as it should be. Moreover, even in classrooms where instruction is based on a formative-assessment paradigm, care must still be taken not to dampen the effectiveness of formative assessment’s usage by, for instance, crafting reports of students’ assessments too broadly or too narrowly for action-taking by teachers or students.

Considerable attention was given in the chap- ter to learning progressions—the sequenced sets of building blocks students must master en route to mastering a more remote, target curricular aim. The building blocks in a learning progression are either (1) bodies of enabling knowledge or (2) cog- nitive subskills. Learning progressions function as the frameworks for the formative- assessment pro- cess because assessments of students’ building- block mastery supply the evidence on the basis of which teachers (or students) decide whether to make adjustments. Suggestions were provided on how to build a learning progression for a selected curricular aim.

The chapter concluded with some speculation regarding why it is that this research- supported, assessment-rooted process is not more widely used by teachers. Possible explanations for the reluctance of many teachers to adopt formative assessment include (1) educators’ misunderstandings about formative assessment, (2) teachers’ natural hesitation to alter their cur- rent behaviors, and (3) the inability of many accountability tests to accurately measure class- room improvements attributable to formative assessment.

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320 Chapter 12 Formative assessment

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322 Chapter 12 Formative assessment

A Testing Takeaway

Formative Assessment: A Process, Not a Test* W. James Popham, University of California, Los Angeles

It was back in 1998 that American educators first heard about formative assessment, roughly 3 years before enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Two British researchers, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, had just published a substantial review covering 10 years of research on classroom assessment. On the basis of their review of more than 250 solid studies, they concluded, “The research reported here shows conclusively that formative assessment does improve learning.” Thus, when NCLB arrived with its pressures to improve students’ performances on states’ accountability tests, numerous U.S. educators turned to formative assessment as a score-raising strategy.

What is “formative assessment”? Here’s one definition that’s reasonably representative of current definitions: Formative assessment is a planned process in which assessment-elicited evidence of students’ status is used by teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures, or by students to adjust their current learning tactics.

Drawing on 4000 investigations during the last 40 years, Dylan Wiliam has observed that, when appropriately implemented, formative assessment can effectively double the speed of student learning.

A useful way to think about formative assessment is that it constitutes a version of the “means-ends thinking” that humans have employed for millennia. Through formative assessment, we can evaluate the means we’re using to reach curricular ends and, importantly, can adjust those means if they’re not achieving the desired ends. Indeed, some believe it is the ends-means nature of formative assessment that makes it so successful.

Formative assessment is a process—not a test. The process calls for the careful collection of assessment information from students so that, if needed, adjustments in instruction can be made by teachers, or learning tactics can be adjusted by students.

Typically, first-time users of formative assessment attempt to make this ends-means process more complicated than it needs to be. As a consequence, many overly zealous teachers abandon this potent, assessment-supported instructional process. It is far better to employ the formative- assessment process selectively, and keep using it, than to plunge feverishly into an elaborate use of formative assessment for a short while, only to abandon it from exhaustion. Remember:

• Formative assessment’s effectiveness is backed up by a host of supportive research.

• Formative assessment is used far less frequently than it ought to be.

• When the formative-assessment process is not routinely used, students are the losers.

Accordingly, if you have an opportunity to implement formative assessment yourself, or to support others’ implementation of formative assessment, do it. Students will benefit.

*From CTapter 12 os Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know, 10tT ed., by W. James popTam. CopyrinTt 2022 by pearson, eTiaT Tereby nrants permission sor tTe reproduation and distribution os tTis Testing Takeaway, eitT proper attribution, sor tTe intent os inareasinn assessment literaay. a dinitally sTareable version is available srom Tttps://eee.pearson.aom/store/en-us/pearsonplus/lonin.

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