EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 8, page 188

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

Effective use of formative assessment can greatly improve teaching and student learning. We can
define formative assessment as any method that teachers use to gather information about students’ learning
in order to improve instruction. There are two parts of this definition. First, teachers gather information
about how well students are learning. Second, teachers use that information to adapt their instruction and
make it better.

Formative assessments can be formal assessments, such as tests and quizzes. For example,
consider a teacher who analyzes the results of a quiz to figure out what his students do not understand, or
what they have misunderstood. Then the teacher uses this information to help students with the particular
concepts that they are having difficulty with. This would be an example of formative assessment, because
the teacher gathers information about students’ difficulties and uses the information to adapt and improve
instruction.

But formative assessments can also be informal. For example, a teacher can learn about students’
thinking by listening carefully to what students say during group work or class discussions. A teacher
might find out by listening to students during group work that a number of students have some
misunderstandings about the causes of the Great Depression. A teacher can use this information to adjust
instruction to address students’ misunderstandings.

Whenever teachers get information about students’ thinking and use this information to adjust and
improve their instruction, they are using formative assessment.

Contrasts with More Traditional Assessment

Formative assessment contrasts with traditional forms of assessment in three ways, discussed
below.

First, the main purpose of traditional assessment is to assign grades. In other words, in traditional
assessment, teachers give tests primarily to evaluate the students and assign them grades. But in formative
assessment, the primary purpose is to gather information about what students are learning and what they
are having difficulty learning, so that this information can be used to improve instruction. Teachers may
assign grades, but this is a secondary purpose, less important than gathering information in order to adjust
and improve instruction.

Second, in traditional assessment, the main output of the teacher’s evaluation is the set of scores
and grades that the teacher has assigned. After grading a test, teacher might know that the class average is
73%, that 15% of her students got A’s, 28% got B’s, and so on. If you ask the teacher how her students did
on a test, she can tell you that Joe got 83%, Cindy got 95%, and so on. But she may be unable to tell you
very much

In contrast, in formative assessment, the most important output of the teacher’s evaluation is a
more detailed analysis of what the students know. The teacher does not just know that the class average is
73%, and so on. The teacher identifies exactly what it is that her students do and do not know. For
example, a teacher might given a quiz in the middle of the unit on the Great Depression. From this mid-unit
quiz, the teacher works out that 90% of the students know all the important dates related to the Great
Depression, and more than 80% can identify one cause of the Great Depression. But only 43% can identify
more than one cause. Furthermore, the teacher finds out that 78% of the students misunderstand the causal
processes by which the stock market crash of 1929 triggered the economic collapse. The teacher gathers
many such pieces of information.