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.

Assessment and Classroom Learning

The power of feedback.

New Patterns of Management.

Whilst many definitions of formative assessment have been offered, there is no clear rationale to define and delimit it within broader theories of pedagogy. This paper aims to offer such a rationale, within a framework which can also unify the diverse set of practices which have been described as formative. The analysis is used to relate formative assessment both to other pedagogic initiatives, notably cognitive acceleration and dynamic assessment, and to some of the existing literature on models of self-regulated learning and on classroom discourse. This framework should indicate potentially fruitful lines for further enquiry, whilst at the same time opening up new ways of helping teachers to implement formative practices more effectively.

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Developing the theory of formative assessment

Our objective has been to develop an instructional theory and corresponding curricular materials that make scientific inquiry accessible to a wide range of students, including younger and lower achieving students. We hypothesized that this could be achieved by recognizing the importance of metacognition and creating an instructional approach that develops students' metacognitive knowledge and skills through a process of scaffolded inquiry, reflection, and generalization. Toward this end, we collaborated with teachers to create a computer enhanced, middle school science curriculum that engages students in learning about and reflecting on the processes of scientific inquiry as they construct increasingly complex models of force and motion phenomena. The resulting ThinkerTools Inquiry Curriculum centers around a metacognitive model of research, called the Inquiry Cycle, and a metacognitive process, called Reflective Assessment, in which students reflect on their own and each other's inquiry. In this article, we report on instructional trials of the curriculum by teachers in urban classrooms, including a controlled comparison to determine the impact of including or not including the Reflective Assessment Process. Overall, the curriculum proved successful and students' performance improved significantly on both physics and inquiry assessments. The controlled comparison revealed that students' learning was greatly facilitated by Reflective Assessment. Furthermore, adding this metacognitive process to the curriculum was particularly beneficial for low-achieving students: Performance on their research projects and inquiry tests was significantly closer to that of high-achieving students than was the case in the control classes. Thus, this approach has the valuable effect of reducing the educational disadvantage of low-achieving students while also being beneficial for high-achieving students. We argue that these findings have strong implications for what such metacognitively focused, inquiry-oriented curricula can accomplish, particularly in urban school settings in which there are many disadvantaged students. (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s1532690xci1601_2)

Inquiry, Modeling, and Metacognition: Making Science Accessible to All Students

The completion of the first ten years of this journal is an occasion for review and reflection. The main issues that have been addressed over the ten years are summarized in four main sections: Purposes, International Trends, Quality Concerns and Assessment for Learning. Each of these illustrates the underlying significance of the themes of principles, policy and practice, which the journal highlights in its subtitle. The many contributions to these themes that the journal has published illustrate the diversity and complex interactions of the issues. They also illustrate that, across the world, political and public pressures have had the effect of enhancing the dominance of assessment so that the decade has seen a hardening, rather than any resolution, of its many negative effects on society. A closing section looks ahead, arguing that there is a move to rethink more radically the practices and priorities of assessment if it is to respond to human needs rather than to frustrate them.

Redefining assessment? The first ten years of assessment in education

Assessment for Learning: 10 Principles

This paper reports the initial results of a study that was designed to develop and test an instrument that could identify the elements of an individual's capacity for lifelong learning. We anticipated that the components of this capacity would include a complex mix of dispositions, lived experiences, social relations, values, attitudes and beliefs and that these various factors would coalesce to shape the nature of an individual's engagement with any particular learning opportunity. The instrument that was developed—the Evaluating Lifelong Learning Inventory—was trialled with pupils across a range of ages and subject to factor analytic study. The data have proved robust over successive factor analytic studies, allowing the identification of seven dimensions of learning power and reliable scales to assess these. These dimensions appear to be capable of differentiating between efficacious, engaged and energized learners and passive, dependent and fragile learners. Whilst further, larger scale field trials w...

Developing an Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory: the ELLI Project

Part 1: introduction and research methods overview of issues research design and methodology. Part 2: changing contexts childhood in England in the 1990s educational changes in the 1990s. Part 3: pupil experience curriculum teacher-pupil relationships learning assessment. Part 4: conclusion.

Patricia Broadfoot

Papers

Redefining assessment? The first ten years of assessment in education

Assessment for Learning: 10 Principles

Developing an Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory: the ELLI Project

What Pupils Say: Changing Policy and Practice in Primary Education

Education, assessment, and society