Formative Assessment

The method of formative assessment was first introduced by Michael Scriven in 1967, and later re-introduced by Benjamin Bloom, who suggested that the term be applied to student learning in 1969. Bloom suggested that formative assessment would be a much more powerful tool if it were separated from the grading process and used primarily as an aid to teaching. Many believe that the practice of formative assessment is rooted in Bloom’s concept of “mastery learning.” This concept is an instructional approach that uses assessments to gauge students’ progress toward mastering a goal (Bloom, Hastings, & Madaus, 1971).
In Developing the Theory of Formative Assessment, authors Black and Wiliam name five key strategies in formative assessment:
1. Clarifying
However, there is no specific definition for what formative assessment should, or must, look like in any given classroom. Catherine Garrison and Michael Ehringhaus describe formative assessment as a way to provide the information needed to adjust teaching and learning while they are happening (2013). Because these assessments can be done in a variety of formats, Garrison and Ehringhaus suggest that there are ways to distinguish these types of assessments from summative assessments. One distinction is to think of formative assessment as “practice” that a student is not held accountable for. The second distinction they describe is student involvement. Garrison and Ehringhaus state that students should be “involved as both assessors of their own learning as well as resources to other students”
Based on this concept, there are many positive attributes of the method of formative assessment. If a teacher uses this type of assessment regularly and effectively in his or her classroom, the impact on student learning would be exceptionally great. By continuously gauging a student or group of students’ knowledge of particular concepts and shaping the approach taken to teach those concepts in order to reach the students’ learning styles and effectively engage students, there would unquestionably be positive results.
In a critical review of the research on formative assessment, Karee E. Dunn and Sean W. Mulvenon (2009) found that formative assessment does improve student achievement. Based on studies by Black and Wiliam (1998), Dunn and Mulvenon explain in their review that research “shows conclusively that formative assessment does improve learning,” and that the gains in student achievement were “amongst the largest ever reported” (p.61). However, it has been reported that there were issues with some of the studies and research that led to these findings, thus, making them less