Dylan William EMBEDDED—FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
Have you noticed
how customized your internet search engine has become? Web providers and social
media are striving to personalize our search results to our individual taste
based on our past selections and pathways. Some would argue this is incredibly
helpful and saves us valuable time. Although if you think critically, it is
incredibly limiting. This “filter bubble” is just giving us information we are
familiar with rather than broadening our perspectives.
Formative Assessments are falling
into the same trap. There is an amazing amount of definitions provided by a
variety of researchers. Depending on who you talk to or what books you have
read, some academics regard formative assessment as a process, others see it as
a tool. Others declare the use of this term should not be used at all, unless
instruction is improved. Another line of thinking popularized by Rick Stiggins
in 2005 is to use the phrase assessment
for learning as defined by the table below.
Formative Assessment
|
Assessment for Learning
|
More
Frequent Assessments
|
Assessment
for Learning is Continuous
|
Providing
Teachers with Evidence
|
Informing
the Students Themselves
|
Who
Is, Who Is Not, Meeting Standards
|
Progress
Each Student is Making Towards Standards While the Learning is Happening
|
William helps us to remember the extensive
work of researcher Randy Bennett. Just replacing the term formative assessment
with the term assessment for learning merely clouds the definitional issue. Bennett
said, “It is an oversimplification to say formative assessment is only a matter
of process, or only a matter of instrumentation. Good process require good
instruments, and instruments are useless unless they are used intelligently.” William
reminds us the original and literal meaning of the word formative suggest these
assessments should provide us with information to shape our instruction.
William’s official definition of
formative instruction is as follows:
An assessment functions formatively to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted and used by teacher, learners, or their peers to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better or better founded, than the decision they would have made in the absence of that evidence.
Unpacking an
assessment requires the teacher, the learner, and the peer to all be involved
with where the learning is going, where the learner is, and how to get there to
adapt teaching to meet the learner’s needs. It essentially a combination of Stiggins
definition of formative assessment and assessment for learning.
My personal
ah-ha moment when reading William’s book was remembering “The teacher’s job is
not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer
effective learning environments for the students. These learning environments need
to be engaging and allow teachers, learners, and peers to progress toward
outcome goals.
Moving
forward requires teachers and students to have a continuous informative understanding
of the progress they are making towards standards while the learning is
happening. These frequent assessments provide the evidence on who is, and who
is not meeting standards and ultimately bridging the gap between teaching and
learning.
What really matters is what kind of
process we value, not what we call them. What filters are you using to
determine your processes of value? I am sure you are utilizing collaborative
filters to continue your growth mindset on what research teaches us is effective
rather than what we think works.
