Extracted Annotations (2020-12-27, 11:35:06 a.m.)
This article is a review of the literature on classroom formative assessment. Several studies show firm evidence that innovations designed to strengthen the frequent feedback that students receive about their learning yield substantial learning gains. The perceptions of students and their role in self-assessment are considered alongside analysis of the strategies used by teachers and the formative strategies incorporated in such systemic approaches as mastery learning. There follows a more detailed and theoretical analysis of the nature of feedback, which provides a basis for a discussion of the development of theoretical models for formative assessment and of the prospects for the improvement of practice. (p. 8)
Our primary focus is the evidence about formative assessment by teachers in their school or college classrooms (p. 8)
The principal reason for this is that the term formative assessment does not have a tightly defined and widely accepted meaning. (p. 8)
In this review, it is to be interpreted as encompassing all those activities undertaken by teachers, and/or by their students, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. (p. 9)
Two substantial review articles, one by Natriello (1987) and the other by Crooks (1988) in this same field serve as baselines for this review. (p. 9)
A second approach was to search by key-words in the ERIC data-base; this was an inefficient approach because of a lack of terms used in a uniform way which define our field of interest. (p. 9)
Natriello's review covered a broader field than our own. The paper spanned a full range of assessment purposes, which he categorised as certification, selection, direction and motivation. (p. 9)
Only the last two of these are covered here. Crooks used the term 'classroom evaluation' with the same meaning as we propose for 'formative assessment'. These two articles gave reference lists containing 91 and 241 items respectively, but only 9 items appear in both lists. This illustrates the twin and related difficulties of defining the field and of searching the literature. (p. 9)
Natriello reviews the issues within a framework provided by a model of the assessment cycle, which starts from purposes, then moves to the setting of tasks, criteria and standards, then through to appraising performance and providing feedback and outcomes. (p. 9)
Crooks' paper has a narrower focus—the impact of evaluation practices on students—and divides the field into three main areas—the impact of normal classroom testing practices, the impact of a range of other instructional practices which bear on evaluation, and finally the motivational aspects which relate to classroom evaluation. He concludes that the summative function of evaluation—grading—has been too dominant and that more emphasis should be given to the potential of classroom assessments to assist learning. (p. 9)
However, in Crooks' view the 'most vital of all the messages emerging from this review' (p. 470) is that the assessments must emphasise the skills, knowledge and attitudes perceived to be most important, however difficult the technical problems that this may cause. (p. 9)
In consequence, decisions about what to include have been somewhat arbitrary, so that we now have some sympathetic understanding of the lack of overlap between the literature sources used in the two earlier reviews. (p. 10)
25 Portuguese teachers of mathematics were trained in self-assessment methods on a 20-week part-time course, methods which they put into practice as the course progressed with 246 students of ages 8 and 9 and with 108 older students with ages between 10 and 14 (Fontana & Fernandes, 1994). (p. 11)
Both groups showed significant gains over the period, but the experimental group's mean gain was about twice that of the control group's for the 8 and 9-year-old students—a clearly significant difference. (p. 11)
However, the work also illustrates that an initiative can involve far more than simply adding some assessment exercises to existing teaching—in this case the two outstanding elements are the focus on self-assessment and the implementation of this assessment in the context of a constructivist classroom. On the one hand it could be said that one or other of these features, or the combination of the two, is responsible for the gains, on the other it could be argued that it is not possible to introduce formative assessment without some radical change in classroom pedagogy because, of its nature, it is an essential component of the pedagogic process (p. 11)
The second example is reported by Whiting et al. (1995), the first author being the teacher and the co-authors university and school district staff. The account is a review of the teacher's experience and records, with about 7000 students over a period equivalent to 18 years, of using mastery learning with his classes. (p. 11-12)
Like the previous study, this work has ecological validity—it is a report of work in real classrooms about what has become the normal method used by a teacher over many years (p. 12)