Formative+Assessments

December 2007/January 2008 | Volume **65** | Number **4** **Informative Assessment** Pages 14-19 //Stephen Chappuis and Jan Chappuis // What is formative assessment, then? First, it's not a product. That was the central misunderstanding of the administrator who asked for an example of a good formative test item. Even though assessments will continue to be labeled //formative// or //summative//, how the results are used is what determines whether the assessment is formative or summative. To begin, let's look at summative assessment. In general, its results are used to make some sort of judgment, such as to determine what grade a student will receive on a classroom assignment, measure program effectiveness, or determine whether a school has made adequate yearly progress. Summative assessment, sometimes referred to as assessment //of// learning, typically documents how much learning has occurred at a point in time; its purpose is to measure the level of student, school, or program success. Formative assessment, on the other hand, delivers information //during// the instructional process, //before// the summative assessment. Both the teacher and the student use formative assessment results to make decisions about what actions to take to promote further learning. It is an ongoing, dynamic process that involves far more than frequent testing, and measurement of student learning is just one of its components. When teachers assess student learning for purely formative purposes, there is no final mark on the paper and no summative grade in the grade book. Rather, assessment serves as practice for students, just like a meaningful homework assignment does. This is formative assessment at its most valuable. Called assessment //for// learning, it supports learning in two ways: Assessment for learning can take many different forms in the classroom. It consists of anything teachers do to help students answer three questions (Atkin, Black, & Coffey, 2001): When students use feedback from the teacher to learn how to self-assess and set goals, they increase ownership of their own success. In this type of assessment environment, teachers and students collaborate in an ongoing process using assessment information to improve rather than judge learning. It all hinges on the assessment's ability to provide timely, understandable, and descriptive feedback to teachers and students. Feedback in an assessment //for// learning context occurs while there is still time to take action. It functions as a global positioning system, offering descriptive information about the work, product, or performance relative to the intended learning goals. It avoids marks or comments that judge the level of achievement or imply that the learning journey is over. Effective descriptive feedback focuses on the intended learning, identifies specific strengths, points to areas needing improvement, suggests a route of action students can take to close the gap between where they are now and where they need to be, takes into account the amount of corrective feedback the learner can act on at one time, and models the kind of thinking students will engage in when they self-assess. These are a few examples of descriptive feedback: In contrast, the feedback from a summative assessment—whether given in the classroom or in a larger context—tells teachers and students who made it to the learning destination and who didn't. The assessment's coded, evaluative feedback—//B+, 84%, Meets Standards, Great Job, Proficient//, and so on—does not identify individual student strengths and areas needing improvement. It does not offer specific information for course correction. Although all formative assessment practices have the potential to increase student learning, assessment for learning in the classroom offers a number of distinct benefits: When we try to teacher-proof the assessment process by providing a steady diet of ready-made external tests, we lose these advantages. Such tests cannot substitute for the day-to-day level of formative assessment that only assessment-literate teachers are able to conduct. The greatest value in formative assessment lies in teachers and students making use of results to improve real-time teaching and learning at every turn.
 * The Best Value in Formative Assessment **
 * The Difference Between Summative and Formative **
 * Assessment ****//<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 20px;">for //****<span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 20px;"> Learning **
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Teachers can adapt instruction on the basis of evidence, making changes and improvements that will yield immediate benefits to student learning.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Students can use evidence of their current progress to actively manage and adjust their own learning. (Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2006)
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 19px;">Where am I going? **
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Give students a list of the learning targets they are responsible for mastering, written in student-friendly language.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Show students anonymous strong and weak examples of the kind of product or performance they are expected to create and have them use a scoring guide to determine which one is better and why.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 19px;">Where am I now? **
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Administer a nongraded quiz part-way through the learning, to help both teacher and students understand who needs to work on what.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Highlight phrases on a scoring guide reflecting specific strengths and areas for improvement and staple it to student work.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Have students identify their own strengths and areas for improvement using a scoring guide.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Have students keep a list of learning targets for the course and periodically check off the ones they have mastered.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 19px;">How can I close the gap? **
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Give students feedback and have them use it to set goals.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Have students graph or describe their progress on specific learning targets.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">Ask students to comment on their progress: What changes have they noticed? What is easy that used to be hard? What insights into themselves as learners have they discovered?
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 20px;">Feedback: The Key Difference **
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">You have interpreted the bars on this graph correctly, but you need to make sure the marks on the //x// and //y// axes are placed at equal intervals.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">What you have written is a hypothesis because it is a proposed explanation. You can improve it by writing it as an "if … then … " statement.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The good stories we have been reading have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I see that your story has a beginning and a middle, just like those good stories do. Can you draw and write an ending?
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">You have described the similarities between _ and _ clearly in this paper, and you have identified key differences. Work on illustrating those differences with concrete examples from the text.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif'; font-size: 20px;">Advantages of Formative Classroom Assessment **
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The timeliness of results enables teachers to adjust instruction quickly, while learning is in progress.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The students who are assessed are the ones who benefit from the adjustments.
 * <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Arial','sans-serif';">The students can use the results to adjust and improve their own learning.

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