Transformative Assessment

W. James Popham

• Verlag: ASCD
• Jahr: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781416612520
• Thema: Education
• Thema: Evaluation & Assessment in Education

Testing expert W. James Popham cuts through the jargon and the hype to provide the definitive nuts-and-bolts introduction to formative assessment, a process with the power to completely transform teaching and learning.

In his inimitable style, Popham explains the research supporting formative assessment's effectiveness and why familiarity with this research is the key to preserving both teacher sanity and district funds. You'll find step-by-step guidance on how to build frameworks for formative assessment and how to carry out each of the process's four levels: teachers' instructional adjustments, students' learning tactic adjustments, a classroom climate shift, and schoolwide implementation.

This book is the place to start for educators considering formative assessment, curious about why their school system is embracing formative assessment, or wondering why the "formative assessments" they're using now aren't producing the desired results. Here, you'll learn what formative assessment is and isn't, what it can do and what it can't, and the practical way to reap its very real rewards: better teaching and better learning.

Note: This product listing is for the reflowable (ePub) version of the book.

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Chapter 1

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Formative Assessment

Why, What, and Whether

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Chapter Preview

• Why formative assessment is garnering so much attention
• What formative assessment is and what it isn't
• The case for using formative assessment

Formative assessment works! This phrase, or some paraphrased version of it, is voiced with increasing frequency in many parts of the world. But why are more and more of today's educators touting the instructional virtues of formative assessment?

Most observers credit British researchers Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam with kicking off today's worldwide interest in formative assessment. In 1998, Black and Wiliam published two important works: an article in the journal Phi Delta kappan and an extensive review of empirical research studies focused on classroom assessment. In their kappan article, Black and Wiliam (1998b) argue that formative assessment, properly employed in the classroom, will help students learn what is being taught to a substantially better degree. They support this argument with evidence from their research review (1998a), a meta-analysis in which they conclude that student gains in learning triggered by formative assessment are "amongst the largest ever reported for educational interventions" (p. 61).

Once educators realized there was ample evidence that formative assessment really was an effective way to improve student learning, it wasn't long before they began investigating the implications and asking the all too obvious follow-up question: If formative assessment could improve student learning in the classroom, couldn't it also improve student test scores on external accountability tests? Considering that so many educators are now figuratively drowning in an ocean of accountability, it's not surprising to see formative assessment cast in the role of life preserver. If it is true that drowning people will grasp at straws in an effort to stay afloat, it is surely as true that they will grasp even more eagerly at "research-proven" straws.

This is not to suggest that all advocates of formative assessment see it primarily as a strategy to fend off pervasive accountability pressure. Many believe that formative assessment will simply help educators do a better job of teaching. These educators might even point out that Black and Wiliam's research synthesis focuses primarily on the classroom dividends of formative assessment and devotes little attention to its potential role in raising external test scores. And many more, if not most, formative assessment proponents choose neither camp exclusively. They believe it can have a positive effect on both students' in-class learning and students' subsequent performance on accountability tests.

All right, that's the why underlying today's ever-expanding interest in formative assessment. Now it's time to take a close look at the what: What formative assessment actually is and what it isn't.

What Is Formative Assessment?

Because there has been so much attention lavished on formative assessment lately, most of today's teachers and administrators have at least a rough idea of what it is. If you asked them to explain it, they might tell you it involves testing students in the midst of an ongoing instructional sequence and then using the test results to improve instruction. By and large, this explanation is correct.

But a "by and large correct" explanation just isn't good enough when it comes to formative assessment. As you'll see in later pages, formative assessment is a potentially transformative instructional tool that, if clearly understood and adroitly employed, can benefit both educators and their students. Mushy, "by and large correct" understandings of formative assessment will rarely allow the fullness of this assessment-based process to flower. That's why I'm now asking you to join me as I dig for a while into the innards of formative assessment.

Historical and Etymological Underpinnings

There is no single officially sanctified and universally accepted definition of formative assessment. Educators have drawn our use of the term formative from Michael Scriven's (1967) groundbreaking essay about educational evaluation, in which he contrasts summative evaluation with formative evaluation. According to Scriven, if the quality of an early-version educational program is evaluated while the program is still malleable—capable of being improved because of an evaluation's results—this constitutes formative evaluation. In contrast, when a mature, final-version educational program is evaluated in order to make a decision about its continuation or termination, this constitutes summative evaluation.

Scriven's insightful split of two program-evaluation roles was widely and rapidly accepted by educational evaluators. Although a handful of early writers, notably Bloom (1969), attempted to transplant the formative/summative evaluation distinction directly onto assessment, few educators were interested in investigating this idea further because it seemed to possess few practical implications for the day-to-day world of schooling.

In fact, it was only during the past decade or two that educators began to discuss whether a distinction between the formative and summative roles of assessment could benefit teachers' instructional decisions. When meaningful interest in this assessment difference finally blossomed, the essence of Scriven's original distinction between the two roles of educational evaluation was retained. That is, we continue to see formative assessment as a way to improve the caliber of still-underway instructional activities and summative assessment as a way to determine the effectiveness of already-completed instructional activities.

With these origins understood, it's time to press on toward the definition of formative assessment that we'll use in this book.

A Carefully Considered Definition

The Council of Chief State School officers (CCSSO) is a major U.S. organization composed of individuals who head the educational system of each state. These officials, typically referred to as "state superintendents" or "state commissioners," are either elected by popular vote or appointed by governors or state boards of education. The "chiefs" have enormous educational influence in their respective states, and in 2006, when CCSSO launched a major initiative focused on a more balanced use of educational assessment and a heightened emphasis on formative assessment, it was a significant policy shift likely to have long-lasting influence on practices in U.S. public schools.

A central activity in the CCSSO assessment initiative was the creation of a new consortium focused specifically on formative assessment. A CCSSO consortium is composed of key department of education personnel from those states that wish to participate. Each of these groups is referred to as a State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards (SCASS), and a new SCASS dealing exclusively with formative assessment, known as Formative Assessment for Students and Teachers—or FAST SCASS, if you're in a hurry—was formed in mid-2006.

FAST SCASS held its inaugural meeting in Austin, Texas, in October 2006, with about 60 participants representing roughly 25 states. The chief mission of the four-day meeting was to reach consensus on a definition of formative assessment, with the ultimate aim of shaping the way U.S. educators understand this practice. Prominent among the concerns of the FAST SCASS members was that the definition reflect the latest research findings regarding assessment practices found to improve the quality of students' learning. Remember this point. It is important.

After considering a variety of earlier definitions, and after numerous foreseeable rounds of participants' wordsmithing, the FAST SCASS group adopted the following definition:

Formative assessment is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning to improve students' achievement of intended instructional outcomes.

Let's look at the key features of the FAST SCASS definition:

• Formative assessment is a process, not any particular test.
• It is used not just by teachers but by both teachers and students.
• Formative assessment takes place during instruction.
• It provides assessment-based feedback to teachers and students.
• The function of this feedback is to help teachers and students make adjustments that will improve students' achievement of intended curricular aims.

I took part in those October 2006 deliberations, and I was relatively pleased with the group's final definition and delighted that it was adopted without dissent. I sincerely hope the FAST SCASS definition will be widely used. But we're not going to use that definition in this book. Frankly, I believe that in our effort to scrupulously reflect the research findings available to us and satisfy the definitional preferences of all the meeting participants, our FAST SCASS group produced a definition that is verbally cumbersome. Although I have no quarrel with what the definition says, it just doesn't say it succinctly enough.

A More Succinct and Useful Definition

What educators really need is a definition of formative assessment that helps them instantly recognize what's most important about this approach. Thus, with apologies to my FAST SCASS colleagues, I present my definition of formative assessment, the one we'll be using in this book:

Formative assessment is a planned process in which assessment-elicited evidence of students' status is used by teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures or by students to adjust their current learning tactics.

As is typical of progeny, the above conceptualization of formative assessment shares much with the FAST SCASS definition from whence it came:

• Again, formative assessment is not a test but a process—a planned process involving a number of different activities.
• One of those activities is the use of assessments, both formal and informal, to elicit evidence regarding students' status: the degree to which a particular student has mastered a particular skill or body of knowledge.
• Based on this evidence, teachers adjust their ongoing instructional activities or students adjust the procedures they're currently using to try to learn whatever they're trying to learn.

Phrasing it more tersely still:

Formative assessment is a planned process in which teachers or students use assessment-based evidence to adjust what they're currently doing.

Now, let's take a slightly deeper look at each of the key attributes of this conception of formative assessment.

A planned process. Formative assessment involves a series of carefully considered, distinguishable acts on the part of teachers or students or both. Some of those acts involve educational assessments, but the assessments play a role in the process—they are not the process itself. An educator who refers to "a formative test" has not quite grasped the concept, because there's no such thing. There are tests that can be used as part of the multistep, formative assessment process, but each of those tests is only a part of the process.

If you accept the distinction between the formative and summative use of test results, then you will recognize that students' results on a particular test might be used for either a summative or a formative purpose. It is not the nature of the test that earns the label formative or summative but the use to which that test's results will be put. If the purpose of Test X is to provide teachers and students with the evidence they need to make any warranted adjustments, then Test X is playing a role in the formative assessment process.

Assessment-elicited evidence. The adjustment decisions teachers and students make during the formative assessment process must be based not on whim but on evidence of the students' current level of mastery with respect to certain skills or bodies of knowledge. Accordingly, the assessment procedures designed to generate this evidence are an indispensable element of the process. Although teachers may certainly employ paper-and-pencil tests for this purpose, they can also obtain the evidence they need via a wide variety of less traditional and much less formal assessment ploys, many of which I will describe later in this book.

Teachers' instructional adjustments. Formative assessment's raison d'être is to improve students' learning. One of the most obvious ways to do this is for teachers to improve how they're teaching. Accordingly, one component of the formative assessment process is for teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional activities. Relying on assessment-based evidence of students' current status, such as test results showing that students are weak in their mastery of a particular cognitive skill, a teacher might decide to provide additional or different instruction related to this skill.

It's worth stressing that because the formative assessment process deals with ongoing instruction, any teacher-made modifications in instructional activities must focus on students' mastery of the curricular aims currently being pursued. It's not a matter of looking at test data and deciding to try a new approach next time; it's a matter of doing something different (or differently) now.

Students' learning tactic adjustments. Within the formative assessment process, students also take a look at assessment evidence and, if need be, make changes in how they're trying to learn. Consider, for example, a high school student who is working toward becoming a better public speaker by practicing a particular speech many times before a mirror. That repeated, solo-mirror practice is the student's learning tactic; based on assessment evidence, this tactic may or may not need adjustment.

I want to wrap up this definition overview by circling back to something very important. One of the most difficult tasks for educators who accept this conception of formative assessment is to grasp the overarching idea that it is a process rather than a test. You may have noted that in many of the preceding paragraphs I have referred to the "formative assessment process." That triple-word phrasing was a ploy to drive the point home. From here on, whenever you see the phrase formative assessment, I trust you'll know that it refers to a multistep process and not to a particular assessment tool.

Why We Need Definitional Clarity

Why have I been making such a fuss about a definition of formative assessment? Is it just so you won't talk past your colleagues when you discuss formative assessment with them? No, there's a more important reason, and it stems from what we do know about certain applications of educational assessment and what we don't know about others.

There are certain educational assessment practices that empirical evidence has shown to have a positive influence on student learning. There are other educational assessment practices that research has not (or has not yet) shown to have this effect. Educators need to be able to distinguish between the former and the latter. Why? So that they will be forearmed against commercial test-development companies that are eager to hitch a profit-making ride on the enthusiasm for formative assessment and, thus, will label as "formative assessment" practices that are not actually consonant with the body of research that validates formative assessment and, therefore, may not deliver the instructional benefits accompanying appropriately implemented formative assessment.

To illustrate how easily educators might be led astray, we need only consider the number of testing companies that are distributing as "formative assessments" products typically referred to as interim or benchmark tests. An interim or benchmark test is one that is administered periodically (perhaps once every two or three months) to measure students' status with respect to mastery of important curricular outcomes. An example of such outcomes might be 15 state-identified mathematical skills assessed each May by a statewide accountability test. A commercial test vendor might develop three different forms of an "interim test" to assess these skills. With each form containing 75 items (5 items per state-identified math skill), the test is designed to provide an indication of a student's mastery status with respect to all 15 skills. The test vendor's marketing materials might suggest that teachers administer the forms at various intervals during the school year: perhaps Form 1 in the fall, Form 2 just after winter break, and Form 3 in the spring, one month before the date of the statewide accountability test. The test...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Formative Assessment: Why, What, and Whether
• Chapter 2. Frameworks for Formative Assessment: Learning Progressions
• Chapter 3. Level 1 Formative Assessment: Teachers’ Instructional Adjustments
• Chapter 4. Level 2 Formative Assessment: Students' Learning Tactic Adjustments
• Chapter 5. Level 3 Formative Assessment: Classroom Climate Shift
• Chapter 6. Level 4 Formative Assessment: Schoolwide Implementation
• Chapter 7. The Limitations of Formative Assessment: What It Can't Do
• Epilogue
• Resources
• About the Author
• Community Guide
• About Professional Learning Communities
• Copyright