Formative assessment

Formative assessment is the ongoing evaluation of a person's performance, affect, and knowledge while the person is actively participating in a learning experience or with an educational product, instead of waiting until the end of the experience to measure performance. Formative assessments are used to evaluate a person's status and needs and subsequently make changes to the educational activities based on the formative assessment results to improve educational outcomes.

Definition

Formative assessments are evaluation actions that are taken to assess how a person is participating and learning from a given educational product while they are still actively participating. The goal of formative assessment of a person is to identify areas where changes in the learning activities could help the person improve their performance, where the person could use support in the learning activities, or where gaps in their understanding exist with which instructional differentiation can help.

Ongoing formative assessment is contrasted with summative assessment. Summative assessment occurs only at the end of the learning experience or once a person is done using an educational product. Summative assessments are the traditional form of assessment in the form of testing or assignments after a learning experience concludes. With summative assessment, there is no opportunity to amend the educational activities or support a learner while they are in the educational experience because it has already been completed by the time summative assessment is performed. Thus, summative assessments can only give a summary of how things went for the person, and not actively support them and improve their outcomes through regular feedback.

Additional Information

Formative assessment is focused on the monitoring of progress, participation, and performance of participants in a learning experience. Scheduled regular or semi-regular formative assessments can give educators an idea on what students are doing and how they are performing. Similarly, formative assessments can provide participants with a snapshot of their performance thus far and give them insights on how their participation and work may be improved moving forward. Through regular check-ins and evaluation of a person's participation, understanding, and skills, a person is encouraged to progress forward with the learning activities and improve their performance based on insights and feedback from the formative assessments.

Teachers perform formative evaluation all the time, and may not even know they are doing it. Teachers frequently notice students' actions, behaviors, attitudes, and attention levels in the classroom. Teachers frequently question and probe their students' understandings. Through dialogue, teachers get students to reveal what they know and don't know, which provides formative evidence of understanding. Formative assessment of learners while they are participating comes down to knowing what students know and making students' knowledge and thinking visible. Although formative assessments are prominent in K-12 and college settings, formative assessment is a good approach for all industries that use educational products, especially when educational activities are sustained.

A key principle of formative assessment is that feedback is regularly provided to participants. Feedback is information provided by another person (e.g., another learner, a teacher, an expert) to improve a person's work, projects, and learning outcomes. Through feedback, a person can review, revise, and improve any work that they have completed with evidence on its various qualities. Additionally, feedback helps people reflect on how they think about and do their work in general, allowing them to alter their performance and tweak how they get things done so that they can improve their future performance. Feedback can come in many forms, but it is specifically information that is delivered to a person with the intent on constructively reviewing and improving performance. It is never critical in the sense of whether someone likes or doesn't like a person or their work. Feedback is a strong mechanism for learning that can give people up-to-the-minute information on how their performance and work aligns with expectations.

Formative assessments should not be thought of as tests or something that people are assigned a grade, but instead as low risk, low stakes evaluation actions that are designed to help performance. Thus, in most settings where grades or credentials are offered, formative assessments are not typically graded for the content of the assessment, but only instead on whether someone participated in the formative assessment. By not having the formative assessment contain any risk or stakes for participation on their final performance grade, a participant can more easily relax and engage with a formative feedback process. Therefore, a formative assessment should be low stakes or risk in the sense that it will not have an impact on the learner's final grade, summative assessments, or possible credential they may receive at the end. The use of formative assessments is not to assign a final evaluation of competence, but instead help improve the processes of learning and skillbuilding throughout the exercise. In short, formative feedback is designed opposite of summative feedback in terms of grades or risk, so that participants don't have to worry about their performance affecting their grade or final evaluation.

Types of formative assessment

Diagnostic assessments. Regular diagnostic assessments can be given to make participants' thinking visible to themselves or to a teacher and for a teacher to know what the participant knows. Formative assessments that gauge participants' current levels of knowledge, skill, attitudes, and behaviors are all types of diagnostic assessments. This information can be used by a teacher or instructional designer to improve the learning activities as they are happening, for a teacher to provide differentiated instruction, or for a participant to review their own performance and identify areas to to improve.
Providing feedback on performance and understanding. A primary feature of formative assessment is by providing feedback to participants on their performance on tasks and within educational activities. Feedback gives participants valuable insights on how their performance may be improved and future work performed at an even higher quality. Feedback can be generated from a self-evaluation using a set of criteria (such as a detailed rubric), or from peers and teachers.
Observing behavior and participation. A participant's behavior and participation are frequently monitored with formative assessments so that the teacher or designer can determine whether they are interacting with the learning experience at an effective level. Digital tools such as learning analytics are increasingly used to capture data about how people participate and use an educationa; product and participate in learning activities. Actionable assessment is that in which learning analytics are used to take immediate action based on the results of ongoing analysis of participation data from within a learning environment.
Observing psychological and environmental factors. Formative assessments do not merely need to measure performance, but also the psychological aspects of someone's participation within a learning experience, such as their interest, motivation, self-efficacy, perceptions, emotions, and other factors known to influence learning and participation. Additionally, aspects of the learning environment may be investigated to monitor whether the environment remains conducive to learning, such as the case of an online learning website's navigation no longer functioning or a classroom becoming too hot, cold, or crowded to effectively conduct the learning exercises.
Identifying challenges and opportunities to help. Participants face challenges and frustrations while engaged in learning activities. Formative assessments can be used to find where these challenge points and "bottlenecks" are in the learning activities for participants of varying skill and knowledge levels. Scaffolding and supports or differentiated instruction may be provided to participants to help them address these challenges.
Making thinking visible. Formative assessments are often designed to provide evidence on what is in a student's mind, such as how they are thinking about problems and what their understandings are related to concepts and topics. Formative assessments can have participants perform tasks that have them discuss, describe, or reveal what they are thinking or recall what they know. Participants can also be asked to perform tasks if they are demonstrating a skill. From participants' performance on these formative assessments, a teacher can identify gaps in their knowledge and provide changes to the learning environment, new content, scaffolding, or differentiated instruction to participants so that they may improve.
Clarifying and refining understanding. Formative assessment can be used as a dialogue and discussion tool to share different perspectives and understandings of complex and hard to define concepts and skills. Through dialogue, a person's thinking and knowledge can be revealed and they can clarify and refine their understanding by considering other definitions, perspectives, and possibilities.
Reflection of learning. Formative assessment is an opportunity for participants to reflect on their experience thus far and how they are achieving any goals that they have set for themselves. Reflection also offers an opportunity for a person to plan their next actions, as well as generate lessons and insights about their past experience by thinking about and analyzing what has happened thus far.

Common methods of formative assessment

Quizzes, midterms, small quizzes. The conventional quiz or test is the most common way to conduct formative assessment, especially when the assessment is measuring knowledge, skills, or psychological factors. However, tests are typically an extra part of the learning activities in which people are participating and can distract people. It is usually best to balance the use of testing assessment instruments so that testing does not take up too large a portion of time.
Check-ins. Discussions, dialogue, and interaction among participants and teachers/facilitators can reveal understandings, gaps in knowledge, and participant needs. Formative assessments do not need a test instrument to be effective - sometimes structured conversations with specific prompts and predetermined questions can reveal much about what people know, perceive, and can do in a learning environment.
Activity as assessment. The activities that people do within a learning environment can also themselves be an opportunity for low-stakes, low-obtrusiveness formative assessment. The work products generated by people as they complete projects and participate in activities can be analyzed for evidence of whether a person successfully used certain skills to complete the project or demonstrated their knowledge about topics and content that are the objective of the activity. The presence or absence of certain traits within activities and work products can be strong evidence of whether a person knows things or can do something. Furthermore, this type of assessment is particularly easier to capture and using digital devices when people create products using these digital devices.
Project milestone evaluation. If participants are working on a long-term project, break the projects up into "milestones" or smaller pieces so that each may be evaluated in a low-stakes, low-stress way. In such, friendly and constructive feedback is provided on each milestone so that participants may improve the milestone work through revisions and improve their future work.
Learning analytics monitoring. Digital analytics can be monitored to see how participants interact within the learning environment and educational product. If participation is not at the expected level, this could indicate that something needs further examination or a participant may need additional support.
Self, peer, and teacher feedback. Regular feedback on work and performance can help learners evaluate and revise prior work and improve their future work. The feedback process itself can be supported by providing rubrics to participants so they can self-evaluate their work with clearly defined criteria. Similarly, other participants (i.e., peers) and facilitators or teachers can provide friendly and constructive feedback on work products and performance to help people improve.
Journaling, reflection, and planning activities. Also helps teachers understand students individual metacognitive skills that they use, which can be strengthened in participants by changes that are made in the learning environment as informed by formative assessment.

Tips and Tricks

With any learning experience, the duration of the activities are an important part of the design. If a learning experience happens over a long duration, think about formative assessments that can be used to help identify what participants know and what they can do throughout the experience. Conversely, formative assessment is not typically as feasible with short duration educational products, as there is little time or necessity to continually gauge participants' understandings and skills.
Ask yourself what kinds of insights might you gain from a formative assessment? Do you want to know how well the participant can perform tasks, or how well they know the content? Do you want to know how much they are participating with the product or experience? Formative assessments are best when they are low risk, low stakes, and don't disrupt the flow of the participant's activity. Ask how might you ask these research questions in a low-risk way, that also doesn't take a lot of time?
Evaluation is about balancing the evaluation and assessment tasks with the actual tasks that are used for learning. Designers should be aware of the amount of assessment tasks that they give participants in proportion to what the actual activities of the learning experience are.
To reduce "testing time", consider using digital analytics when possible. Data that are automatically captured when people participate with a digital system or when they produce digital products (e.g., documents, media) can be collected unobtrusively and do not bother the participant with evaluation tasks while they are participating in learning activities. The use of digital analytics is easiest to implement in online and digital learning environments, but also not impossible to do in face-to-face learning environments either (e.g., through video and audio recordings).
A robust learning experience provides opportunities to help people of all skill levels actively participate in the learning activities. Think about ways that you can identify, measure, or spot whether a person could use some support in performing the activities in your design, which is an important aspect of formative assessment.

Formative assessment

From The Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase

Contents

Definition

Additional Information

Types of formative assessment

Common methods of formative assessment

Tips and Tricks

Related Concepts

Examples

External Resources