Researcher Laura Greenstein sums up a professional consensus on formative assessment, which is rooted in three significant concepts:
- Formative assessment is focused on students.
- Formative assessment is instructionally informative.
- Formative assessment is based on outcomes. Frequent opportunities for teachers to identify student progress and provide feedback are at the heart of formative assessment. Formative assessments are used to capture snapshots of students' knowledge or skill at particular moments. There are many ways that teachers generate these snapshots of how their students are doing to track their progress.
Some aspects of effective formative assessment strategies include:
- Use questions as assessments and as feedback that moves learning forward.
- Involve students in thinking about their learning.
- Plan to assess learning during and between lessons (short-cycle formative assessment).
- Provide immediate feedback.
- Look for patterns in student work and plan future instruction based on the results.
