Developing Instructionally
Embedded Formative Assessments
William D. Schafer
University of Maryland
• Conference is about formative and interim
assessments
• Formative is generally thought of as in
opposition to summative
• Summative assessments are important but
will only be mentioned as a way to
differentiate formative assessments
• Interim assessments will also be mentioned in
my remarks, but not much
Goals of the presentation:
– discuss how I feel it is best to think of formative
assessments
– describe characteristics of formative assessments I
feel are most useful to teachers and students
– describe a possible way to generate formative
assessments
– suggest what a state might do to bring the
possibility to a reality
• Formative and summative are terms originating
in the program evaluation literature (Dunn &
Mulvenon, 2009)
• Formative evaluation means making decisions
about how well implementation is proceeding in
order to make decisions about whether to
continue as-is or to revise the program (Scriven,
1967)
• Summative evaluation means making decisions
about whether the program should be certified,
and perhaps disseminated
• These terms were first applied to assessment by
Bloom (1969)
• Dunn and Mulvenon (2009) and Good (2011)
have traced how different authors have
defined formative assessments
• Good (2011) emphasized that the use of the
assessment information as opposed to
characteristics of the assessment, itself is
what should define the term “formative”
• But “formative assessment” is still a handy
term, as long as we understand that it means
something like any tool providing
information to aid in making judgments
about the success of instruction or learning
• We generally think of summative assessments
as those used to make evaluative judgments
following a period of instruction, such as a
unit or a semester or a year or even an entire
schooling
• Nevertheless, I have been trying to think of a
real-world example of an educational
assessment that can’t be used formatively by
someone to make decisions about future
instruction and/or learning
• I can’t! (Can you?)
• Interim is a newer term and means essentially
tests like the statewide summative assessments
applied during the school year
• They are used to see whether students are
developing toward eventual proficiency
• Frankly, what educators are supposed to do with
this information is not very clear to me
• Why test students before they have had
opportunity to learn the full academic year’s
curriculum?
• And what is an interim use of assessment
information that is neither formative nor
summative?
• Do we really need this new term??
• Here, I want to ignore both interim and
summative assessments and focus on
formative assessment uses
• I’ll use the term “formative assessment,” to
mean assessments used for formative
(instructional or learning) purposes
• An assessment provides information and the
use of the information is what makes the
assessment formative
• I’ll first discuss usefulness of formative
assessments and then turn to a policy-level
proposal for creating them
• If use defines a formative assessment what
should formative assessments look like to be
most useful?
• The fundamental assumption of my presentation
is that to be most useful, formative assessments
should be embedded in instructional units
• This applies to both content and timing. A
formative assessment should provide needed
information to decision makers at optimal times
• You can in theory pick one up from one unit and
drop it into another but you are almost surely
better off creating one for the unit you are
working with
• This assumption implies that formative
assessments should be instructionally
embedded
• They may come in all reasonable assessment
formats, such as
– homework assignments
– class work
– brief quizzes
– brief or extensive writing assignments (hopefully
coupled with rubrics)
– oral interactions, individually or in groups
• Good instructional and/or learning decision
making requires good information
• Good information requires good assessments
• Good assessments are not trivial to develop
and neither are they trivial to evaluate
• Bad assessments can be dangerous, since they
give bad information that affects future
actions
• So we need a way to generate, evaluate, and
disseminate instructionally embedded
formative assessments
• Formative assessments are needed in much
greater volume than summative assessments
• They are used more often, even though any
one of them is used with fewer students
• Fortunately, their linkage with instruction may
provide a way to develop them efficiently and
effectively
• I will turn to a mechanism that could
generate, evaluate, and disseminate formative
assessments embedded in instructional units.
• I will then suggest steps a state could take to
refine and establish the mechanism
• Because of the close relationship with instruction,
I feel teachers should be creating formative
assessments as they develop instructional units
• In my version of utopia, I envision a computerized
database of instructional units that have been
approved by the state and that can be searched
by teachers to review available options for their
upcoming instructional activities (Schafer &
Moody, 2004)
• While the focus here is on instruction, the
database would need to incorporate appropriate
formative assessments
• I would like to see curriculum specialists,
instructional specialists, and assessment
specialists making recommendations about how
teachers can enhance their personal instructional
units from all three perspectives
• This will require assessment expertise
– In-service workshops could be created to help
teachers develop and use formative assessments as
part of their instructional units
– Rick Stiggins and his colleagues at the Assessment
Training Institute have given us models of effective inservice experiences for teachers; these could be used
more broadly
– Sue Brookhart (2011) has recently discussed the
needed content
• A format is needed to express the unit plans, including
(a) individual lesson plans to support a unit plan with
goals tied explicitly to state curricula
(b) formative assessments designed to help the teacher
make those instructional decisions that help them
initially motivate their students, help them decide
whether or not to go on, help them determine if their
students can generalize what they are learning to
novel applications, etc.
(c) formative assessments for students designed to help
them understand what their learning goals should be,
how well they are grasping the material, where they
can get help if they need it, etc.
(d) summative assessments that can be used at the end
of the instructional unit to certify achievement (e.g.,
to be used in assigning a grade for the unit)
• The units could be tried out and the data analyzed in
order to document effectiveness
• There could be a peer review process like we use in our
own research journals. Peer reviews generate revision
and resubmission requests, which is reasonable here
and gives direction to the authors to improve
• Each unit, including its formative assessments and a
summative assessment at the end, can be certified by
the enabling authority (e.g., a state education agency
or a consortium) and made available electronically
throughout a broad community of educators
• The units could be selected by teachers who feel they
will be useful, perhaps with modifications, and
reviewed as teacher-users feel they have something
helpful to say
• Meaningful rewards for authoring teacher groups
when their units are selected into the database
could include
– recognition (e.g., a plaque for the teachers and the
school, and an article in the local newspaper)
– money (e.g., a one-year increase in their salary steps)
• As with university faculty, recognition in terms of
prestige, job performance reviews, and bonuses
or raises can be significant motivators.
• Recognition vehicles for evaluating peers who
reviewed and hopefully tried out the units also
need to be worked out
• This process would involve some extra effort in
the beginning,
• In the end it would result in less work for
teachers who capitalize on the unit plans in the
data base instead of creating their own unit and
lesson plans from scratch
• I see the process being implemented by a sevenperson Unit Review Team consisting of
– a curriculum specialist in each of four contents
(English, math, science, social studies)
– an instruction specialist at each of two levels:
elementary, high school)
– an assessment specialist
• Finally, let’s turn to how can a state can get
started
• Some thoughts are described here, but a state
will need to develop its own process with
modifications as its stakeholders review and
hopefully sign-on
• First, an overview of the process will be described
• It could be implemented by a seven-person
committee like that mentioned earlier
• Following the overview, seven concrete (but
tentative) steps are suggested to facilitate
implementation
• Teacher groups should evaluate and tweak
this proposal.
• They should be asked to list the elements that
should appear in a unit plan based on what
they would find useful and what they feel
teacher groups could create
• A format should be a tangible result, which
should be evaluated by curriculum,
instruction, and assessment professionals
• A feasible and effective reward structure also
needs to be proposed
• At the same time principals could nominate
experienced teacher groups (say, a dozen groups,
in different contents at different grades) who are
willing to follow the format to prepare a
submission
– The submissions could be compared with the format
to see where either they or the format might be
revised
– The units could be returned to the teacher groups for
revision
• Other principals could solicit reviewing teachers
who actually try the units out and make
recommendations back to the Unit Review Team
and through them to the development group for
revisions
• This is much like a journal’s peer review process
On the other end of the process, the structure
of the database needs to be developed
• Teacher focus groups could recommend the
characteristics they would find most helpful in
searching the data base
• Accepted units can be added to the database
and plans made to solicit more
• So what can a state do to implement and
facilitate this concept?
• Seven steps are described, most of which are
cost-effective
• I’ll use “the state” to refer to any entity that
might be appropriate, such as a consortium
(hint … hint)
• First, the state should define its curricular goals.
• This can be done through a forthright explanation of
each of its constructs (combinations of content and
grade level)
• I have elsewhere described the concept of assessment
limits (Schafer & Moody, 2004; Schafer, in press)
• These are very specific elaborations of the potential
scope of a state’s assessments
• They are at-most lists for test developers and at-least
lists for teachers)
• Maryland’s web sites have numerous examples. E.g.,
http://mdk12.org/share/frameworks/CCSC_Math_gr8.
pdf where the assessment limits are called “Essential
Skills and Knowledge.”
• Second, the thinking processes that the state will
assess also needs elaboration.
• What does the state feel students need to do with each
of the content elements?
• Those that are important enough to test are important
enough to circulate among practitioners.
• We need to understand the intended content of the
summative assessment before we can judge how well a
unit and its associated assessments are aligned to
appropriate content
• There are many choices to do this (Schafer, in press)
• It is a necessary element of an alignment study but
should be developed as part of a curriculum rather
than as part of assessment development
• Third, the state should express its summative
assessments in terms of blueprints that specify the
content, process, and difficulty distributions of the
items on them
• Blueprints formalize the range of possible topics and
activities that students might be asked to exhibit as
well as the levels of achievement they will find
represented
• They are useful in evaluating alignment of any
assessment to the content (Schafer, in press)
• They can also be useful in evaluating the alignment of
instruction with the content
• They are necessary to evaluate a unit since the unit
needs to have at a minimum learning goals consistent
with the state, in scope, depth, and “rigor.”
• Fourth, a complete development of the state’s
assessment scales would also be helpful
• This includes interpreting the achievement levels
(degrees of success that students and teachers
can strive for).
• This is often done using achievement level
descriptions
• Perhaps more effective would be to include
examples of performance at each level
• A reasonable way to do that would be to provide
scale locations for all released items
• That would describe actual operational
definitions of the achievement levels to go along
with the usual verbal characterizations, which are
often ambiguous
• Fifth, teachers need to have an understanding of
how to build and use assessments formatively.
• This includes assessments for both teacher and
student insights (decision making).
• Development of assessment competencies (See
Brookhart, 2011) through in-service workshops
like those Rick Stiggins delivers through the
Assessment Training Institute is a possible
approach for a state
• But in the end, educators in the state might do
best to take control of their own assessment
learning, perhaps with the help of outside
experts facilitated by the state
• Sixth, the state might convene teacher groups to study,
what nature of the unit plan data base would be most
helpful, both to search and then to use.
– How specific should it be?
– What variables should be used to search it?
– What descriptions would be most useful in helping a
teacher quickly decide whether it would be appropriate for
his or her situation?
– How can the plans be best expressed?
– How can quality unit plans be encouraged but not be
onerous to produce?
– What incentives would work, both for teachers, principals,
and the state?
• These can be explored in order to shape the database
into a resource that can make meaningful change in
what goes on in classrooms, and to capitalize on what
segments of the teacher workforce can do well already.
• Seventh, the state needs to institute a review,
revision, re-review process. This can be modeled
after the peer review process and administered
by the seven-person committee of experts in the
contents and in assessment development and
use.
• This sort of effort would have at least three
desirable outcomes. It would
– increase teacher professionalism,
– avoid the loss of good developmental work done by
teachers who retire or change grade levels or even
careers,
– and certainly affect what goes on in schools and
classrooms on a daily basis
References
•
Brookhart, S. M. (2011). Educational assessment knowledge and skills for
teachers. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 30(1), 3-12.
•
Dunn, K. E. & Mulvenon, S. W. (2009). A critical review of research on formative
assessment: The limited scientific evidence of the impact of formative assessment
in education. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 14(7). Available
online: http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=14&n=37.
•
Good, R. Formative use of assessment information: It’s a process, so let’s say what
we mean. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 16(3). Available online:
http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=16&n=3.
•
Schafer, W. D. (in press). A process for systematic alignment of assessments to
educational domains. In Schraw, G., & Robinson, D. R. (Eds.). Assessment of higher
order thinking skills. New York, NY: Information Age Publishers.
•
Schafer, W. D. & Moody, M. (2004). Designing accountability assessments for
teaching. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 9(14). Available online:
http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=9&n=14.