Assessing whether or not students learn what they are supposed to has long been part of the educational process, encouraged even more in recent years by mandates to meet federal No Child Left Behind requirements and state achievement standards.
But unlike summative assessments, which rely mostly on end-of-year test scores to gauge student achievement, formative assessments help shape instruction through repeated measures as students are learning. As a result, formative assessment is capturing new attention among teachers and administrators.
As district leaders know, formative assessment is not new. "It's been here a long time. It's just that we are paying more attention to it now," says Raymond Yeagley, vice president of product and business development for the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a national nonprofit based in Lake Oswego, Ore., that provides computer-adapted assessment services.
Formative assessment is "the name of the game these days" in schools, adds Ray Wilson, executive director of assessment and accountability in the Poway (Calif.) Unified School District. "If you really want to improve student performance, you need to focus on formative assessment primarily and on summative assessment secondarily," he says.
More than just whether students are passing or failing, formative assessment gives teachers and administrators information they need to determine suitable learning programs for students who need help in specific instructional areas. The information comes from benchmark and diagnostic tests that measure not just whether students are meeting required standards but that also identify learning difficulties they may be experiencing. It also is called adaptive assessment, because tests can be adapted to individual students' skill and knowledge levels while they are being given.
Wilson, whose district uses NWEA assessments, describes the benefits with a barnyard analogy: "Summative assessment just weighs a pig. Formative assessment provides the information you need to feed the pig so that it grows."
Personal and Group Targets
Poway tests all its students three times a year-in the fall, winter and spring. After the fall and winter tests, teachers set personal growth targets for individual students, telling them what they have to learn to get higher test scores next time, Wilson says.
"When you have a big body like the federal government which gives you money, you want to please them." -Clayton Collins, director of instruction, Beech Grove (Ind.) City Schools
Teachers also set classroom goals, such as working more on vocabulary, to improve students' collective performance. "We have learned that setting group targets, in addition to their own targets, is very motivating for kids," Wilson says.
Clayton Collins, director of instruction in the Beech Grove (Ind.) City Schools, which also uses NWEA's assessments, says pressures to satisfy NCLB and state requirements cause districts to focus on students' test results. "When you have a big body like the federal government which gives you money, you want to please them," he says.
But whether students pass or fail a test does not accurately indicate whether they really are learning, Collins maintains. "If a teacher can get good growth out of her students, then they are successful. It has nothing to do with whether or not they pass a state test," he says.
Beech Grove uses NWEA's Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) for primary grades. MAP are state-aligned tests that reflect students' knowledge and growth over time. They can be adapted to students' individual achievement level, giving teachers information about what each student has learned and is ready to learn next. MAP also provide reports of student achievement for school administrators and parents.
Aware of NCLB pressures, NWEA has enhanced some MAP features, including using pictures and sound to enhance questions of specifically K2 students. For example, students might be shown cartoon pictures of a dog, a kite and a bug and be instructed to match the letters D, K and B to sounds that correlate to the pictures. Collins says the measures help prepare Beech Grove's second-graders for third grade, which is when the district starts testing them for NCLB proficiency standards.
