Handbook of Formative Assessment in the Disciplines

Heidi L. Andrade, Randy E. Bennett, Gregory J. Cizek, Heidi L. Andrade, Randy E. Bennett, Gregory J. Cizek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351681469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Evaluación y valoración en la educación

The Handbook of Formative Assessment in the Disciplines meaningfully addresses current developments in the field, offering a unique and timely focus on domain dependency. Building from an updated definition of formative assessment, the book covers the integration of measurement principles into practice; the operationalization of formative assessment within specific domains, beyond generic strategies; evolving research directions including student involvement and self-regulation; and new approaches to the challenges of incorporating formative assessment training into pre-service and in-service educator training.

As supporters of large-scale testing programs increasingly consider the potential of formative assessments to improve teaching and learning, this handbook advances the subject through novel frameworks, intersections of theory, research, and practice, and attention to discernible disciplines. Written for instructors, graduate students, researchers, and policymakers, each chapter provides expert perspectives on the procedures and evaluations that enable teachers to adapt teaching and learning in-process toward student achievement.

PART I

Theoretical Advances

1

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

History, Definition, and Progress

Gregory J. Cizek, Heidi L. Andrade, and Randy E. Bennett

If you ask five teachers what formative assessment is, you’re likely to get five different answers.

The above observation about formative assessment was the opening sentence of a recent examination of the topic published in Education Week (Gewertz, 2015, p. S2). Indeed, as we will see later in this chapter, although the term formative assessment has experienced a long history and increasing contemporary interest, it is used in diverse ways—including ways that overlap other usages of the term and ways that are synonymous with other assessment concepts.

Despite the diversity of usage, the concept of formative assessment has attracted the attention of researchers, educators, and policy makers as a promising mechanism for increasing student learning. As one of us has written, policy initiatives that rely on mandated large-scale summative assessments have likely reached a point of diminishing returns as a mechanism for spurring increased achievement. Thus, formative assessment may represent “the next best hope for promoting greater achievement gains for students” (Cizek, 2010, p. 15).

In general, large-scale summative testing, such as the assessments mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (2001) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015), remains a cornerstone of state and federal educational policy and enjoys fairly broad public support. For example, one recent national survey found that 63% of adults support or strongly support the federal requirement that all students be tested in mathematics and reading each year in grades 3–8 and once in high school (West et al., 2018). Another poll revealed that 67% of respondents indicated that “using tests to measure what students have learned” was rated as either important or very important for improving the quality of public schools (Kernan-Schloss & Starr, 2015, p. K12).

At the same time, there are hints of an increasing lack of faith that summative assessment will continue to be an effective policy lever for improving American education, and some level of disillusionment is evident. The reliance on summative assessments for boosting achievement may have run its course. For example, it is clear that an increasingly large constituency of parents is not content with the status quo, either believing that the amount of testing time should be reduced or supporting “opting out” of state-wide summative tests altogether (Bennett, 2016; Kernan-Schloss & Starr, 2015). Perhaps one way to reconcile the somewhat contradictory findings about mandated summative assessment is to observe that although parents still approve of mandated summative testing for monitoring achievement and supporting policy actions, they do not view that form of assessment as highly valuable for increasing achievement.

Educators, too, have become less enthusiastic about large-scale summative assessments. Perhaps mostly because these measures have increasingly been appropriated for use in personnel and organizational evaluation and accountability systems, large-scale mandated summative testing is not seen as a valuable tool for directing attention to teaching and learning of the type that would generate classroom learning gains (see Kernan-Schloss & Starr, 2015; Wang, Beckett, & Brown, 2006).

Some Beginning Definitions

Before further examining the characteristics and potential of formative assessment as a complement to summative testing, it seems appropriate to define some key terms somewhat more formally. We have already used the term summative assessment in this chapter. To be clear, we are using this term to mean a form of information gathering about students that is conducted primarily for the purposes of making judgments about the status of individual learners or determinations about the effectiveness of educational programs or systems. For the most part, those judgments or determinations occur at single time points and are evaluative; that is, they represent primarily conclusions about what has occurred, either in terms of student accomplishment or attainment of institutional goals. For example, at the student level, summative assessment would be exemplified by the use of test performance to assign grades; at the system level, an example of summative assessment would be the use of aggregated test performance to create accountability indicators such as adequate yearly progress or value added indices for teachers, schools, or state education systems.

A succinct definition of summative assessment is provided in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing: “The assessment of a test taker’s knowledge and skills typically carried out at the completion of a program of learning, such as the end of an instructional unit” (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, and National Council on Measurement in Education [AERA, APA, & NCME], 2014, p. 224; hereafter, Standards). Foreshadowing what we will see in definitions of formative assessment, this definition highlights the characteristic of summative assessment as being “at the completion” of an educational experience. This characteristic, for example, would apply to student grades on report cards, end-of-course or end-of-grade examinations, and to monitoring mechanisms such as yearly school report cards or other such annual accountability reporting systems.

As has been pointed out previously, the information yielded by any type of assessment and the use of that information are separate, but related, measurement issues (see Cizek, 2016). Accordingly, a summative assessment may have one of many targets (e.g., the measurement of ability, achievement, interest, college readiness, vocational aptitude), and may be of any format (e.g., oral questioning, portfolio, multiple-choice test items, performance tasks). It is not necessarily the target or format of an assessment that determines what kind of an assessment it is; rather, it is how the assessment information is used that is the primary driver in its classification. Put another way, one might not be able to tell simply by looking that an assessment was summative; one would need to know what use was being made of the assessment results in order to ascertain what type of an assessment had occurred.

That said, there is also another consideration in assigning the label formative to an assessment: the intended use of an assessment should be a central focus in its design. Whereas an assessment that was explicitly designed as a summative assessment could be used in a formative manner (and vice versa), that would clearly not be an optimal situation. Rather, a characteristic of any sound assessment is that it is used in the way it was designed. It follows that the optimal instantiation of a formative assessment is one that is both designed and actually used that way. To build a useful assessment, one needs to begin with a clear sense of its purpose; the actual use of an assessment can define its function, but that intended function should also be focused and improved by design.

Although it is sometimes portrayed as an alternative to summative assessment, we view formative assessment as a complementary activity designed to address very different aims. The Standards define formative assessment as “an assessment process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning with the goal of improving students’ achievement of intended instructional outcomes” (AERA, APA, & NCME, 2014, p. 219). As an aside, we note that, other than a definition of formative assessment in a glossary, there is no other explicit attention to formative assessment in the Standards—no best practices, no guidelines for construction or use, and no individual standards for formative assessment. Nonetheless, at least three aspects of the definition of formative assessment found in the Standards are noteworthy and stand in contrast to the characteristics of summative assessment.

First, assessment typically involves two parties: educators and students. In summative assessment contexts, educators help design, write, score, and use results, whereas students provide the responses—a comparatively passive form of involvement. Those responses on summative assessments are then used by educators to serve the purposes of grading, monitoring, accountability, and so on. On the other hand, formative assessment typically engages both parties to a greater degree. The preceding definition highlights the distinction that, in contrast to summative assessments, formative assessment is a more collaborative endeavor that involves both educators and students in more elaborated and differentiated roles. For example, in a formative assessment context, educators play a role in designing and leading instructional events, but students can also play a role in setting learning goals. Formative assessment provides information that teachers can use to focus or redirect instruction; it also provides information that students can use to assess their own and each other’s learning. In short, formative assessment calls for more of an interaction between educators and students than does summative assessment.

Second, whereas summative assessments occur at the end of an instructional program, the above definition characterizes formative assessment as occurring alongside, or even within instruction. In this regard, the labeling of an assessment can—though not always does—provide a clue as to the type of assessment. For example, the term end-of-course testing frequently implies a summative assessment, whereas some versions of formative assessment have been described as embedded assessments.

Third, whereas summative assessments are primarily conducted for the purposes of making evaluative decisions about individuals or programs, with allowances for formative uses of summative data, the focus of formative assessment is squarely on providing feedback and information for adjusting ongoing teaching and learning. Numerous writers have characterized the difference in these primary summative and formative goals as “assessment of learning” versus “assessment for learning” (see, for example, Assessment Reform Group, 1999; Stiggins, 2005). A widely-cited metaphor by the prolific contributor to the field of program evaluation, Robert Stake, captured the distinction between summative and formative assessment in this way: “When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative; when the guests taste the soup, that’s summative” (Miller et al., 2016, p. 288).

Although that dichotomous way of categorizing assessments is somewhat useful, we think a more nuanced approach is warranted. Recalling Stake’s analogy, it is certainly possible for the guests to both taste the soup and judge it overall, but also to offer suggestions for improving it. Assuming some soup remained in the pot or the chef planned to prepare the recipe again, the guests’ suggestions would represent a formative use of summative information. In a testing context, this means that summative tests can yield formatively useful information.

The same does not hold as neatly for formative assessment. Although it is not uncommon for teachers to use impressions gained from a series of formative assessments to inform their judgments in assigning grades or otherwise documenting achievement, such uses can too easily corrupt the formative assessment process and so, we assert, summative uses of formative assessment should be discouraged. Thus, an important distinction between summative and formative assessment lies in their potential uses: Summative assessment data can be used formatively, but formative assessment information should, in general, be used only formatively.

Although the distinctions between summative and formative assessment just presented may be clear in concept, there is at present a serious—and, we believe, consequential—lack of clarity about the definition of formative assessment. In subsequent portions of this chapter, we will describe the variety of definitions and instantiations of what is called formative assessment, and we will identify the deficiencies in those conceptualizations. Then, we will suggest a next-generation definition that we believe best captures the characteristics of formative assessment that are associated with improvements to teaching and learning. For now, however, we turn to a brief historical tracing of the concept.

Evolving Notions of Formative Assessment: An Historical Review

Nearly all attempts to identify the origins of the concept of formative assessment trace beginning usages of formative to Michael Scriven, who coined the term formative evaluation. Scriven invoked the term in the course of responding to a 1963 article by Lee Cronbach regarding the evaluation of educational programs in which Cronbach asserted that “evaluation, used to improve the course while it is still fluid, contributes more to improvement of education than evaluation used to appraise a product already placed on the market” (p. 236). In a research monograph published later that year, Scriven countered that prioritizing one evaluation focus over another was needless: “Fortunately we do not have to make this choice [between summative and formative evaluation]. Educational projects, particularly curricular ones, clearly must attempt to make best use of evaluation in both these roles” (1963, p. 6). Scriven went on to provide a rudimentary definition of formative evaluation: “This kind of research can be called process research, but it is of course simply outcome evaluation at an intermediate stage. . .” (p. 16).

The distinction between summative and formative aims in evaluation was quickly popularized through the work of Benjamin Bloom and his associates via the Handbook of Formative an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Part I Theoretical Advances
• Part II Intersections of Theory, Research, and Best Practices in Formative Assessment in the Disciplines
• Part III Professional Preparation in Formative Assessment
• List of Contributors
• Index