Formative Assessment

Goals of Formative Assessment

Formative assessment is a feedback process intended to support teachers and students in understanding the progress that students have made and identifying areas for further support as students work toward the goals of an instructional unit. Thus, the degree to which this approach is formative depends on the teacher’s use of the information. That is, formative assessment is not a measurement format as much as it is way of interacting with the findings from any measurement undertaken during the course of a unit of instruction. Feedback is considered to be a powerful aspect of instructional design, though there is not much research on it.

One might undertake formative assessment for any of three main purposes. First, a teacher may want to identify students’ strengths or weaknesses, understand gaps in learning, or look for underlying misconceptions. Identifying such shortcomings or weaknesses is a common element of any assessment approach. To be formative, the approach must be undertaken during the process of the learning (e.g., during a unit of instruction, not at the end) and must be used to guide subsequent instruction rather than serve as a final measure of knowledge development. A second goal for conducting formative assessment is to assist in the planning of instruction. By conducting such assessments, teachers can more readily customize instruction to meet the needs of their students, to address specific points of confusion, or to revisit concepts and skills that need additional elaboration. A third goal of formative assessment is to aid students in their own learning. That is, formative assessment provides a scaffold for students to take additional ownership over their education by helping [Page 292]them see those concepts and skills that they have not yet mastered or that they have not yet explored. By supporting learners in seeing discrepancies between the goals of the instruction and their current understandings, teachers can help their students take more ownership of the learning process. Thus, formative assessment is seen as relevant for all ages of learners, not just K–12 students.

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