Advancing Formative Assessment in Every Classroom

A Guide for Instructional Leaders

Connie M. Moss, Susan M. Brookhart

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781416626725
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Evaluation & Assessment in Education

Formative assessment is one of the best ways to increase student learning and enhance teacher quality. But effective formative assessment is not part of most classrooms, largely because teachers misunderstand what it is and don't have the necessary skills to implement it.

In the updated 2nd edition of this practical guide for school leaders, authors Connie M. Moss and Susan M. Brookhart define formative assessment as an active, continual process in which teachers and students work together—every day, every minute—to gather evidence of learning, always keeping in mind three guiding questions: Where am I going? Where am I now? What strategy or strategies can help me get to where I need to go?

Chapters focus on the six interrelated elements of formative assessment: (1) shared learning targets and criteria for success, (2) feedback that feeds learning forward, (3) student self-assessment and peer assessment, (4) student goal setting, (5) strategic teacher questioning, and (6) student engagement in asking effective questions.

Using specific examples based on their extensive work with teachers, the authors provide- Strategic talking points and conversation starters to address common misconceptions about formative assessment;
- Practical classroom strategies to share with teachers that cultivate students as self-regulated, assessment-capable learners;
- Ways to model the elements of formative assessment in conversations with teachers about their professional learning;
- "What if" scenarios and advice for how to deal with them; and
- Questions for reflection to gauge understanding and progress.

As Moss and Brookhart emphasize, the goal is not to "do" formative assessment, but to embrace a major cultural change that moves away from teacher-led instruction to a partnership of intentional inquiry between student and teacher, with better teaching and learning as the outcome.

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Chapter 1

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The Lay of the Land: Essential Elements of the Formative Assessment Process

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When teachers join forces with their students in the formative assessment process, their partnership generates powerful learning outcomes. Teachers become more effective, students actively engage to become assessment-capable, and they both become intentional learners.

We can use the metaphor of a windmill to visualize the formative assessment process and its effect. Just as a windmill intentionally harnesses the power of moving air to generate energy, the formative assessment process helps students intentionally harness the workings of their own minds to generate motivation to learn. Propelled by the formative assessment process, students understand and use learning targets, set their own learning goals, select effective learning strategies, and assess and regulate their own learning progress. And as students develop into more confident and competent learners, they become motivated (energized) to learn, increasingly able to persist during demanding tasks and regulate their own effort and actions when they tackle new learning challenges.

When a windmill whirls into action, its individual blades seem to disappear. The same thing happens to the six elements of the formative assessment process. These interrelated elements are the following:

• Shared learning targets and criteria for success
• Feedback that feeds learning forward
• Student self-assessment and peer assessment
• Student goal setting
• Strategic teacher questioning
• Student engagement in asking effective questions

As teachers and students actively and intentionally engage in learning, the individual elements unite in a flurry of cognitive activity, working together interdependently. Their power comes from their combined effort.

What Is Formative Assessment?

Formative assessment is an active and intentional learning process that partners the teacher and the students to continuously and systematically gather evidence of learning with the express goal of improving student achievement. Intentional learning refers to cognitive processes that have learning as a goal rather than an incidental outcome (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989). Teachers and their students actively and intentionally engage in the formative assessment process when they work together to do the following (Brookhart, 2006):

• Focus on learning goals.
• Take stock of where current work is in relation to the goal.
• Take action to move closer to the goal.

The primary purpose of formative assessment is to improve learning, not merely to grade or audit it. It is assessment for learning rather than assessment of learning. Formative assessment is both an "instructional tool" that teachers and their students "use while learning is occurring" and "an accountability tool to determine if learning has occurred" (National Education Association, 2003, p. 3). In other words, to be "formative," assessments must inform the decisions that teachers and their students make minute by minute in the classroom. Figure 1.1 compares the characteristics of formative assessment and summative assessment.

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Figure 1.1. Characteristics of Formative and Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment (Assessment for Learning)

Purpose: To improve learning and achievement

Carried out while learning is in progress—day to day, minute by minute

Focused on the learning process and the learning progress

Viewed as an integral part of the teaching-learning process

Collaborative—Teachers and students know where they are headed, understand the learning needs, and use assessment information as feedback to guide and adapt what they do to meet those needs.

Fluid—An ongoing process influenced by student need and teacher feedback

Teachers and students adopt the role of intentional learners.

Teachers and students use the evidence they gather to make adjustments for continuous improvement.

Summative Assessment (Assessment of Learning)

Purpose: To measure or audit attainment

Carried out from time to time to create snapshots of what has happened

Focused on the products of learning

Viewed as something separate, an activity performed after the teaching-learning cycle

Teacher-directed—Teachers assign what the students must do and then evaluate how well they complete the assignment.

Rigid—An unchanging measure of what the student achieved

Teachers adopt the role of auditors and students assume the role of the audited.

Teachers use the results to make final "success or failure" decisions about a relatively fixed set of instructional activities.

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Here are some examples of the formative assessment process in the classroom:

• A teacher asks students in her 6th grade social studies class to form pairs to generate three strategic questions that will help them better meet their learning target of describing how erosion has produced physical patterns on the Earth's surface that have affected human activities.
• Before a lesson on creating a family budget, a consumer science teacher states the learning target for the lesson and asks the students to paraphrase it.
• In a high school English class, students use a rubric that they generated as a class to plan their essays, monitor their writing, and edit their drafts in order to meet the success criteria for a high-quality essay.
• In his feedback to a 1st grade student, a teacher shows the student what she did correctly in her attempt to draw the life cycle of a frog. Then the teacher gives the student a strategy to use to improve the accuracy of her drawing before she turns in her final sketch.
• A middle school student decides to use a story map to plan his short story depicting life in the Victorian era. It will help him reach his goal of improving the organization and sequencing of his story.

How Does a Learning Target Theory of Action Guide the Formative Assessment Process?

At its core, the formative assessment process aligns what happens in the classroom—day to day and minute by minute—with three central questions:

• Where am I going?
• Where am I now?
• What strategy or strategies can help me get to where I need to go?

These central questions guide everything the teacher does, everything the student does, and everything teachers and their students do together. The questions are deceptively simple, yet to address them students and teachers must become skilled assessors who can gather evidence about where student understanding is in relation to a shared learning target. Only then can the teacher-student learning team use the evidence to make informed decisions about what to do next and choose strategies that have the best chance to close the gap and raise student achievement.

This continuous process of intentionally gathering and using evidence of student learning to make decisions about next steps is succinctly described in our learning target theory of action (Moss & Brookhart, 2012), which states that "[t]he most effective teaching and the most meaningful student learning happen when teachers design the right learning target for today's lesson and use it along with their students to aim for and assess understanding" (p. 9). To engage in formative assessment, then, teachers must work to design and share a learning target for the lesson, use that target (and have their students use it) to assess present levels of student understanding, and then partner with students to strategically narrow the gap between where the students are and where they need to go to reach mastery. Once a learning target is mastered, a new "just right" target is set and the process continues forward. It comes down to the Goldilocks Principle: to generate motivation to learn, the level of challenge and the level of support must be just right. And that means all classroom decisions—those made by the teacher and those made by the students themselves—must be informed by up-to-the-minute evidence of student learning in relation to the lesson's specific learning target.

A learning target theory of action and the three central questions of formative assessment are a great starting point for school leaders as they help teachers recognize and use the formative assessment process in their classrooms. They can guide teachers as they (1) plan their lessons, (2) monitor their teaching, and (3) help their students become self-regulated, assessment-capable learners. Teachers can display the three questions along with the lesson's learning target in their classrooms and remind their students to think about them before, during, and after each learning experience.

How Does the Formative Assessment Process Affect Student Learning and Achievement?

There is a firm body of evidence that formative assessment is an essential component of classroom work and that its development can raise standards of achievement. We know of no other way of raising standards for which such a strong prima facie case can be made.

—Paul Black & Dylan Wiliam,
"Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment" (1998)

The research is clear: formative assessment works. It works because it has a direct, evidence-based effect on the two most important players in the teaching-learning process: the teacher and the student.

In too many classrooms, teachers and their students are flying blind. Teachers cannot point to strong evidence of exactly what their students know and exactly where their students are in relation to daily classroom learning targets. The lack of detailed and current evidence makes it particularly difficult for teachers to provide effective feedback that describes for students the next steps they should take to improve their understanding and their work. Students are operating in the dark as well. Without knowing how to assess and regulate their own learning, they cannot be their own agents, capable of making decisions about how to improve their learning and their work while they are learning and working. By contrast, when teachers partner with their students to use evidence of learning to make continual adjustments to improve learning, those adjustments are more likely to be effective (Wiliam, 2018).

Effects on Teacher Quality

Teacher quality exerts a strong influence on student achievement (Darling-Hammond, 1999; Hanushek, Kain, O'Brien, & Rivkin, 2005; Thompson & Wiliam, 2007). What's more, research tells us that teachers become more effective as they develop strategies for evaluating the impact of their own teaching practices on students' learning (Darling-Hammond, 2013). Formative assessment helps increase teacher quality because it operates at the core of effective teaching (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Elmore, 2004) and helps teachers to gauge their influence during each lesson (Moss & Brookhart, 2015). Through the formative assessment process, classrooms become the setting for meaningful professional learning: teachers learn about effective teaching by studying the effectiveness of their own instructional decisions. This practice promotes continuous improvement based on evidence that is relevant, authentic, and transformational.

Learning to teach better by examining one's own teaching practices is much more effective than attempting to apply professional development focused on using best practices in the classroom. Studies (e.g., Devine, Fahie, & MacGillicuddy, 2013; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2014; Turner, Christensen, & Meyer, 2009) clearly show that teachers do not always adopt the research-based best practices they read about or learn in workshops. Rather, teachers teach in ways they believe to be best, often ignoring the findings of educational research. The distinction here is critical. Teachers' beliefs not only determine what they do in the classroom but also influence what they count as evidence that learning has occurred. And unless professional learning experiences help teachers examine their working assumptions about how students learn and how good teaching supports learning, they will not make meaningful changes in their teaching practices (Moss, 2002).

Formative assessment can have a transformational effect on teachers and teaching (see Figure 1.2). Because it promotes evidence-based self-assessment, the formative assessment process reveals individual teaching decisions so that teachers can see clearly (perhaps for the first time) the difference between the intent and the impact of their actions. Armed with this new perspective, teachers can take constructive action in their classrooms. They begin to collect and use strong evidence of exactly what works and exactly what does not work with their students. And, as they critically examine their own knowledge, practices, and working assumptions—during each day, each lesson, and each interaction with their students—they become inquiry-minded and keenly aware of exactly where they need to focus their improvement efforts and what next steps they need to take to raise student achievement.

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Figure 1.2. Impact of the Formative Assessment Process on Teachers

Teachers Adopt a Working Assumption That … Students learn more effectively when they know and understand the learning target.

Teachers Take Constructive Action to …

• Bring precision to their planning.
• Communicate learning targets in student-friendly language.
• Unpack the exact criteria students must meet to succeed on each task.

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Teachers Adopt a Working Assumption That … To help each student succeed, I must ...