Introduction:
The purpose of this book
Unlocking
Formative Assessment is the follow-up to
Targeting Assessment in the Primary Classroom (Clarke, 1998), which
broke new ground in describing, in practical terms, how formative assessment
strategies might looking the classroom. The success of that book was
largely due to the source of its ideas – the tried and tested methods of
hundreds of teachers and schools shared at INSET courses with me at the
Institute of Education or in my research projects. Over the last three
years, my work with teachers has been continuing, on an even larger scale,
and there is now so much more to add.
Unlocking
Formative Assessment takes the strategies further
and deeper, shows more examples of teachers’ systems, and introduces three
new aspects of formative assessment: monitoring, questioning and
self-esteem. It also provides more links with established research. The
section on marking is particularly well developed, as a result of my own
research interests in this area.
The current context
Formative
assessment has at last become a term known to most
educators in the UK. Over a period of ten years, understandings of
assessment have developed from a notion of ongoing assessment as no more
than regular summative assessments, through a middle period of more
child-centered approaches via records of achievement, portfolios or
significant achievement folders, to a more comprehensive picture of what
really makes children progress.
Although much has been said about the
differences between summative and formative assessment, I believe we need to
simplify this argument in order to get on with developing classroom
strategies which help children to learn. My definition of the two types of
assessment, through a gardening analogy, hopefully adds to the continuing
understanding of purposes of assessment:
If we think of our children as plants…summative
assessment of the plants is the process of simply measuring them. The
measurements might be interesting to compare and analyse, but, in
themselves, they do not affect the growth of the plants. Formative
assessment, on the other hand, is the garden equivalent of feeding and
watering the plants – directly affecting their growth.
The turning point:
Black and Wiliam’s findings
By 1997, the assessment emphasis from
Government in England was quite clearly focused on summative
assessment. Even Teacher Assessment was described as the end-of-key-stage
leveling process, rather than the ongoing understanding of children’s
understanding. A group of assessment academics, naming themselves the
Assessment Reform Group, decided that something significant needed to happen
to convince policymakers to change their emphasis, or even just to
acknowledge the power of formative rather than summative assessment.
To that end, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam,
from King’s College, University of London, were commissioned to find out
whether or not formative assessment could be shown to raise levels of
attainment. The pair embarked on a year’s work, trawling through all the
studies since 1988 which involved aspects such as sharing learning goals,
pupil self-evaluation and feedback. Many studies were rejected through lack
of rigor, as Black and Wiliam decided to take account only of those where a
control group had been set up and children had been tested before and after
the trial, so that learning gains could be measured and compared.
They found that formative assessment
strategies do indeed raise standards of attainment, with a greater effect
for children of lower ability. At GCSE they were able to calculate that the
improvement amounts to between one and two grades’ increase. They did not
calculate what this might mean for primary age levels, but the implications
are clear.
The resulting lengthy article was published
in an academic journal (Black and Wiliam, 1998), and received national and
international interest over the findings. That interest is still growing,
as many countries are now finding out about the impact of formative
assessment as a result of Black and Wiliam’s trawl. Unfortunately, the very
people who most need to know about this research, the teachers, are often
the last to know – a flaw in the way in which research is often
disseminated. Accordingly Black and Wiliam produced a digest of the
article, entitled Inside the Black Box, which summarized the key
findings. This was followed by Assessment for Learning: Beyond the Black
Box, written by the Assessment Reform Group.
The purpose of these little books was to
begin to bullet-point the conditions for success in the classroom, making
them more accessible to teachers. Both digests give schools ideal material
to use for parent communication and in policies, as they consist of many
summary statements. My own work with teachers, including various research
projects, aims to flesh out and define in more practical terms what
formative assessment actually looks like in the classroom.
Bringing together so many studies led to
the identification of clear themes. However, one theme emerged which Black
and Wiliam saw as the key to successful learning: the importance of high
self-esteem. This is dealt with in depth towards the end of this book –
because the theme of self-esteem recurs throughout, so the threads are
brought together as a kind of finale.
The key findings from Black and Wiliam’s
research are reproduced here:
The research indicates that improving
learning through assessment depends on five, deceptively simple, key
factors:
- The provision of
effective feedback to pupils;
- The active
involvement of pupils in their own learning;
- Adjusting teaching
to take account of the results of assessment;
- A recognition of
the profound influence assessment has on the motivation and self-esteem of
pupils, both of which are crucial influences on learning;
- The need for pupils
to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve.
(page4)
This was further broken down to include:
- Sharing learning
goals with pupils,
- Involving pupils in
self-assessment,
- Providing feedback
which leads to pupils recognizing their next steps and how to take them,
- Underpinned by
confidence that every student can improve.
(page 7)
The inhibiting factors identified
included:
- A tendency for
teachers to assess quantity of work and presentation rather than the
quality of learning;
- Greater attention
given to marking and grading, much of it tending to lower the self-esteem
of pupils, rather than to provide advice for improvement;
- A strong emphasis
on comparing pupils with each other which demoralizes the less successful
learners;
- Teachers’ feedback
to pupils often serves managerial and social purposes rather than helping
them to learn more effectively.
(page 5)
(Assessment Reform Group, 1999)
The picture painted appears quite bleak,
but these strategies have given teachers a way forward. The current context
in primary education in England is that government targets must be
met. This has led to a classic ‘high-stakes’ testing culture, because the
measure used is the number of Level 4s achieve in Key Stage 2 tests.
Inevitably, as with all high stakes testing, this has led to a narrowing of
the curriculum and frequent teaching to the test, especially in Year 6.
Ironically, if the national emphasis were on formative assessment,
and if funding reinforced that emphasis, the government targets would
probably be met via formative strategies being universally applied in our
classrooms. It is by good teaching and learning that standards rise, not by
summative or short-term measures to boost attainment – as has been proven by
the Black and Wiliam research trawl.
The current OFSTED Handbook reflects the
new emphasis on formative assessment in its key paragraph on assessment:
Do teachers assess pupils’ work thoroughly
and use assessments to help and encourage pupils to overcome difficulties?
Your judgments about teachers’
assessment of their pupils should focus on how well teachers look for gains
in learning, gaps in knowledge and areas of misunderstandings, through their
day-to-day work with pupils. This will include marking, questioning of
individuals and plenary sessions. Clues to the effectiveness of formative
assessment are how well the teachers listen and respond to pupils, encourage
and, where appropriate, praise them, recognize and handle misconceptions,
build on their responses and steer them toward clearer
understanding. Effective teachers encourage pupils to judge the success of
their own work and set targets for improvement. They will take full account
of the targets set out in individual education plans for pupils with special
educational needs.
(Handbook for Inspecting Primary and
Nursery Schools,
OFSTED, 2000)
We need both summative and formative
assessment, not one or the other, because they both fulfill different,
parallel purposes, as the gardening analogy shows. Making clear the
difference between these purposes is of prime importance in helping teachers
understand what is important and when each should be used. I recommend that
assessment policies are divided into two sections, describing firstly the
summative measures in place in the school and secondly formative strategies.
Summative assessment
Current
practice tends to consist of the following:
- Baseline testing on
school entry;
- Statutory
end-of-key-stage tests;
- Non-statutory
‘optional’ tests;
- Commercially produced
tests, if chosen by the school;
- School and class
tests, created by teachers;
- End-of-key stage
Teacher Assessment levels;
- End-of-year levels or
sub-levels for individual children, currently tracked to see whether
children are in line with projected targets for Year 6;
- Any other summative
information about performance in the school.
Formative assessment
Practice drawn from the research base tends
to consist of the following:
- Clarifying learning
intentions at the planning stage, as a condition for formative assessment
to take place in the classroom (chapter 1);
- Sharing learning
intentions at beginnings of lessons (chapter 2);
- Involving children in
self-evaluation against learning intentions (chapter 3);
- Focusing oral and
written feedback around the learning intentions of lessons and tasks (chapter
4);
- Organizing individual
target setting so that children’s achievement is based on previous
achievement as well as aiming for the next level up (ipsative referencing)
(chapter 5);
- Appropriate
questioning (chapter 6);
Raising children’s
self-esteem via the language of the classroom and the ways in which
achievement is celebrated (chapter 8).
