Formative assessment refers to assessment that is specifically intended to generate feedback on performance to improve and accelerate learning (Sadler, 1998).

A major landmark in the emergence of formative assessment as an explicit domain of practice was a synthesis of research findings conducted by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in 1998. 

This synthesis built on prior reviews and encompassed “diverse bodies of research including studies addressing: teachers’ assessment practices, students’ self-perception and achievement motivation, classroom discourse practices, quality of assessment tasks and teacher questioning, and the quality of feedback” (Shepard, 2009).

Formative assessments help teachers identify concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning targets they have not yet achieved so that adjustments can be made to lessons, instructional techniques, and academic support. They also help identify which students need to be challenged. The general goal of formative assessment is to collect detailed information that can be used to improve instruction and student learning while it’s happening.

A formative assessment technique could be as simple as a teacher asking students to raise their hands if they feel they have understood a newly introduced concept, or it could be as sophisticated as having students complete a self-assessment of their own writing (typically using a rubric outlining the criteria) that the teacher then reviews and comments on.

Black and Wiliam proposed that effective formative assessment involves:

• Teachers making adjustments to teaching and learning in response to assessment evidence.
• Students receiving feedback about their learning with advice on what they can do to improve.
• Atudents' participation in the process through self-assessment.

The difference between Formative and Summative assessments:

Formative assessments differ from summative assessments because summative assessments are used to evaluate the student learning progress and achievement at the conclusion of a specific instructional period—usually at the end of a project, unit, course, semester, program, or school year. Assessment expert Paul Black put it, “When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative assessment. When the customer tastes the soup, that’s summative assessment.”

• Questions that teachers pose to individual students and groups of students during the learning process to determine what specific concepts or skills they may be having trouble with.
• Specific, detailed, and constructive feedback that teachers provide on student work, such feedback is found within journal entries, essays, worksheets, research papers, projects, ungraded quizzes. The feedback may be used to revise or improve a work product.
• “Exit slips” can quickly collect student responses to a teacher’s questions at the end of a lesson or class period. Based on what the responses indicate, the teacher can then modify the next lesson to address concepts that students have failed to comprehend or skills they may be struggling with.
• “Bell ringer” entries are a similar strategy to “exit slips” and are used at the beginning of a class or lesson to determine what students have retained from previous learning experiences.
• Purposeful checks to ensure students understand concepts (thumbs up/down).
• Self-assessments that ask students to think about their own learning process, to reflect on what they do well or struggle with, and to articulate what they have learned or still need to learn to meet course expectations or learning standards.
• Peer assessments that allow students to use one another as learning resources. For example, “work-shopping” a piece of writing with classmates is one common form of peer assessment, particularly if students follow a rubric or guidelines provided by a teacher.

The Educational Responsibility Shift: Weakness or Strength?

Clearly there are several strengths to formative assessment.

In order to create visible learning, students need to be formatively assessing themselves; however, over the last two decades, there has been a shift in the way teachers and researchers write about student learning in higher education. Instead of characterising it as a simple acquisition process based on teacher transmission, learning is now more commonly conceptualised as a process whereby students actively construct their own knowledge and skills (Barr and Tagg).

Students interact with subject content transforming and discussing it with others in order to internalise meaning and make connections with what is already known. Terms like ‘student-centred learning’, which have entered the lexicon of higher education, are one reflection of this new way of thinking. Even though there is disagreement over the precise definition of student-centred learning, the core assumptions are active engagement in learning and learner responsibility for the management of learning (Lea, Stephenson and Troy, 2003).

Despite this shift in conceptions of teaching and learning, a parallel shift in relation to formative assessment and feedback has been slower to emerge. In HE, formative assessment and feedback are still largely controlled by and seen as the responsibility of teachers; and feedback is still generally conceptualised as a transmission process even though some influential researchers have recently challenged this viewpoint (Yorke, 2003; Boud, 2000, Sadler, 1998). Teachers ‘transmit’ feedback messages to students about what is right and wrong in their academic work, about its strengths and weaknesses, and students use this information to make subsequent improvements. 

Several implications come form a constructivist angle, proposed by Crahay who developed the argument that a "constructivist perspective is necessary but nevertheless insufficient for the definition of optimal procedures of formative assessment" (Allal & Lopez, 2005). Certain preoccupations of the constructivist perspective, such as the identification of learning processes and strategies that account for observed responses, have received renewed treatment in the light of contemporary theories of cognitive psychology.

Implications were drawn from these theories for two major aspects of assessment: (1) the development of diagnostic models of formative assessment based on research on learning difficulties in the areas of reading and (2) the investigation of the role of metacognitive processes in formative assessment and in self-assessment (Allal & Lopez, 2005).

When an educator uses Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment, there can also be several implications with formative assessment being insufficient unless it aligns well with the principles:

1. Motivate and focus student learning with question-driven instruction.
2. Develop students' understanding and fluency with dialogical discourse.
3. Inform and adjust teaching and learning deceisions with formative assessment.
4. Help students develop metacognitive skills and cooperate in the learning process with meta-level communication. (Beatty & Gerace, 2009)