Formative Assessment: The Development Of Formative Assessment In Education

In education, the term assessment refers to the “wide variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document the academic readiness, learning progress, skill acquisition, or educational needs of students” (Abbot, 2016). Educators use a “diverse array of assessment tools and methods to measure everything from a four-year-old’s readiness for kindergarten to a twelfth-grade student’s comprehension of advanced physics” (Abbott, 2016). Assessments are typically designed to measure specific elements of learning. They are also used “to identify individual student weaknesses and strengths so that educators can provide specialized academic support, educational programming, or social services” (Abbott, 2016). A wide array of

These assessments are an effective way to help educators “identify concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning standards they have not yet achieved so that adjustments can be made to lessons, instructional techniques, and academic support” (Abbott, 2014). The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning and provide ongoing feedback that can be used by educators to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. Formative assessments gather information that can be used to help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need

Formative feedback can help to clarify and calibrate learning expectations for both students and parents. Students gain a clearer understanding of what is expected of them, and parents have more detailed information they can use to more effectively support their child’s education.

 Raise or accelerate the educational achievement of all students, while also reducing learning gaps and achievement gaps.

Formative assessments are about checking for understanding in an effective way in order to guide instruction. They are used during instruction rather than at the end of a unit or course of study. If they are used correctly, and often there is a chance instruction will slow when we discover we need to re-teach or review material the students don’t understand. Formative assessments are only effective when educators are clear about the intended learning goals for a lesson. In order to achieve success, educators need to focus on what students will learn, as opposed to what they will do. To achieve “maximum transparency for students, teachers share the learning goal, or actively create it with students, at the beginning of the lesson” (Heritage, 2012). To gain results, educators need to collaborate with students to determine the learning