Within a teaching context, formative assessment means gathering data about what students do and don’t get, how they’re thinking, etc. for the purpose of guiding ongoing teaching and learning. It’s assessment to improve learning, not to evaluate it. An implication is that assessment is only formative if the information gathered is actually used to inform decision-making by the teacher and/or students.
An intriguing research result is that formative assessment may actually be counterproductive if the teacher doesn’t have adequate strategies for responding to that information. Here’s a quote about that from a paper by Dylan Wiliam:
What is less clear is what exactly constitutes effective classroom assessment. Although the studies cited above indicate that assessment for learning can improve learning, several studies have found conflicting results. For example, in a study of 32 fifth-grade teachers in Germany, Helmke and Schrader (1987) found that teachers who had an accurate knowledge of their students (as measured by the teachers’ ability to predict achievement test scores) were associated with higher levels of achievement only when the teachers also showed a high range of instructional techniques. Students taught by teachers who had a high knowledge of their students’ achievement but lacked a range of instructional techniques actually performed worse than students taught by teachers who did not know their students’ achievement. This study seems to indicate that collecting data if one cannot do anything with it is counterproductive.
Furthermore, even when teachers do manage to use information about student achievement to adjust or individualize their instruction, teachers may lack the ability to do so effectively. For example, in a 20-week study of 33 teachers in elementary and middle schools, Fuchs, Fuchs, Hamlett and Stecker (1991) found that teachers who received feedback on the achievement of students with learning difficulties in their classes made more adjustments to their teaching programs than teachers not given this information. However, the achievement of these students was improved only when this feedback was accompanied by advice from a computerized “expert system”, because the teachers not given the feedback from the expert system tended to re-explain how to do problems with the same algorithms that had led to previous failure.
Source: Wiliam, Dylan. “Keeping Learning on Track: Classroom Assessment and the Regulation of Learning.” In Second Handbook of Mathematics Teaching and Learning. Edited by Frank K Lester. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2007. pp. 10-11. [PDF preprint]
