Five key strategies of formative assessment
Dasha Bunks
Liberty University
PSYC 775 - Teaching of Psychology
Dr. Winn
2022
Five key strategies of Formative assessment
Formative assessment is any assessment that is used to guide future learning. Years ago, Lee
Cronbach pointed out that an assessment was simply a procedure for making inferences. When those
inferences involve what the student can do right now, or what they may be able to do in the future,
then the assessment is functioning summatively. However, when the inferences made on the basis of
the assessment results relate to instructional decisions, then the assessment is functioning formatively.
More specifically, according to Black and Wiliam (2009), an assessment functions formatively to the
extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners,
or their peers to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better
founded, than the decisions that would have been taken in the absence of that evidence. What this
means is that results from almost any assessment can be used formatively, provided that they are used
to improve instruction. The important point is that the sooner an instructional adjustment is made, the
more effective it is in improving learning.
Five key strategies
With our colleagues at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), we have identified five key strategies
for assessing student learning:
1. For each important new concept or assignment, teachers should make the learning
expectations clear and share with students the criteria for successfully meeting those expectations. This
need not always be done at the beginning of each session, but students should get regular reminders of
where they are headed, together with summaries of progress toward these goals.
2. Use evidence from classroom discussions, student answers and learning tasks to revise
lessons and activities. Teachers can use various techniques that engage all students in discussion and
use revealed evidence of student thinking and understanding as they plan future instruction.
3. Provide feedback that clearly and explicitly identifies what needs to be improved in
order to move learners forward and promote students' understanding of concepts. To best meet
students' immediate learning needs, teachers should use this evidence to adapt instruction in real time
4. Encourage students to serve as instructional and learning resources for one another on
a daily basis
5. Encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning
Formative feedback is essential to the assessment process as it allows teachers to collect the
evidence they need to immediately address their students' learning needs.
Student outcomes
These key strategies of assessment for learning can be expected to produce the following student
outcomes:
Students will become more engaged with lesson content and activities.
Students will support each other and take responsibility for their own learning within well-
established criteria for quality.
Students will act on feedback in order to improve their assignments.
Students' learning will improve, as evidenced by test scores and other indicators.
Do these techniques require a specific kind of testing?
According to Black and Wiliam (2004a), the effectiveness of formative assessment on student
learning comes from the feedback provided by the teacher, not from the kind of assessment used. The
teacher must have evidence of learning that can be used to provide students with "minute by minute"
feedback. This finding means that many different kinds of teacher-made and standardized assessments
can provide the evidence needed to guide teacher feedback. Evidence of student learning that comes
from informal sources such as whole-class or small-group discussions, as well as class polls (a quick show
of hands), can also be useful, provided they are not just self-reports about the levels of confidence
students have in their responses.
How do teachers learn to use these techniques?
Groups of teachers working together (called teacher learning communities) can share ideas and
support one another as they implement the five key strategies in their own classrooms. Extensive
research by Leahy and others has concluded that these types of groups are most effective when they are
composed of teachers from a variety of subject-matters and grade levels working together to support
one another (view these strategies on the Educational Leadership website).
When does the strategy work?
Formative assessment has been shown to work with a wide variety of learners. Much of our
earlier work was undertaken in mathematics, science and English classrooms, but our research in other
subject matter areas has also confirmed those findings. Overall, their research is specifically applicable
to the following types of students:
All grade levels (kindergarten, elementary, high school and college-aged students).All ethnic
groups (white, black, Hispanic and Asian-American).All settings (urban, suburban and rural ).Males and
females.All competence levels (special education through gifted).
Perhaps even more interestingly, the model of the five strategies of formative assessment,
supported through the use of learning communities, has also been found to be effective with
instrumental music tutors, librarians, adult numeracy and literacy practitioners, youth workers, and
community advocates.
Teacher and student differences
After establishing teacher learning communities in countries all around the world, we have found
that formative assessment strategies are most effective when tailored by individual teachers to meet
the unique needs of their students and contexts. For example, teachers who use the "find and fix"
technique (pairs of students working together to identify and correct errors on an assessment) discover
that younger students can only use this technique with short assessments (two or three problems);
whereas older students can use the technique with much longer assessments.
Research evidence
Black and Wiliam's (1998a) reviewed over 600 research studies on the effects of feedback and
other aspects of formative assessment and cited 250 studies in their "best-evidence" synthesis of the
effects of formative assessment on learning. They found that effective use of formative classroom
assessment yielded high levels of student achievement (effect sizes ranged from between 0.4 to 0.7 of a
standard deviation). Nyquist (2003) found effect sizes for formative feedback ranging from 0.3 to 0.5 of a
standard deviation, and other researchers have found effect sizes in the same range.
While there have been recent critiques of the research basis for the claims around formative
assessment (see, e.g., Bennett, 2011; Kingston & Nash, 2011) much of the criticism stems from an
inadequate understanding of the limits of effect sizes in synthesizing educational research. For example,
the meta-analysis by Kingston and Nash concluded that formative assessment might improve
educational achievement by around 0.2 to 0.3 standard deviations, which following Cohen (1988) they
classed as "small." However, since most of the studies synthesized by Kingston and Nash were
conducted on middle and high school students, such effect sizes are equivalent to a 50 to 100 percent
increase in the rate of learning (Bloom et al., 2008). While researchers will always say, "More research is
needed" it does seem as if the extent of the available evidence suggests that attention to classroom
formative assessment practices can have substantial positive impacts on student achievement.
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