To review and reflect on formative assessment practice for School Teachers. As a focus for professional development in formative assessment for secondary schools.

1. Online Workshop
An Introduction to
Formative Assessment
For Secondary School Teachers

2. Who will find this workshop useful?
• Teachers
• Syndicates / departments
• AtoL facilitators
How to use this workshop:
• To update, review, and reflect on formative assessment
practice for secondary schools syndicates / departments.
• As a focus for professional development in formative
assessment for secondary schools.
• To support AtoL in-depth programmes in schools.

3. Thinking about assessment
Click here to complete a
quick assessment quiz –
no ‘right’ answers, but
plenty of food for
thought!

4. What is assessment?
• Assessment in education is the process of gathering,
interpreting, recording and using information about
pupils’ responses to an educational task.
Harlen, Gipps, Broadfoot, Nuttal (1992)

5. Assessment
• Helps us distinguish between teaching and learning.
• The focus must be on the quality of feedback and feed-
forward rather than the quantity of information gathered by
the teacher.

6. Formative and summative assessment
• Assessment is primarily concerned with providing
teachers and/or students feedback information.
• It is not the instrument that is formative or summative,
it is the timing of the interpretation and thus the
distinction between them is not that helpful.
John Hattie, University of Auckland (1999)

7. • Formative assessment takes place during the course of
teaching and is used essentially to feed back into the teaching
and learning process.
• Formative and summative assessment are interactive. They
seldom stand alone in construction or effect.
Gipps, McCallum & Hargreaves (2000)
Formative and summative
assessment, cont

8. • The vast majority of genuine formative assessment is informal,
where feedback and response is interactive and timely.
• It is widely and empirically argued that formative assessment
has the greatest impact on learning and achievement.
Formative and summative
assessment, cont

9. Lessons from research
In 1998 Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam of Kings College London
published the findings of their wide-reaching analysis of research
into classroom-based assessment in the document: “Inside the
Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment”
To download a full-text copy, go to:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/education/publications/blackbox.html
For a summary of the paper and a professional reading activity
click here.

10. Research indicates that improving learning
through assessment depends of five,
deceptively simple, key factors:
1. The provision of effective feedback to the students.
2. The active involvement of students in their own learning.
3. Adjusting teaching to take account of the results of
assessment.
4. A recognition of the profound influence assessment has on
the motivation and self esteem of the students, both of which
are crucial influences in learning.
5. The need for students to be able to assess themselves and
understand how to improve.

11. In action this means:
• Sharing learning goals with students.
• Involving students in self assessment.
• Providing feedback which leads to students recognising
and taking the next steps.
• Being confident that every student can improve.

12. Self-evaluation, 1
How well do you…
– Share learning goals with students?
– Involve students in self assessment?
– Provide timely focused feedback?
Do you have confidence that every student in your
classes can improve?
Think now about some of the things that prevent us
from assessing in a formative manner.
Rate yourself from:
5 I do this
consistently well
to:
0 I don’t do this at
all

13. Inhibiting factors include:
• A tendency for teachers to assess quantity and presentation of
work rather than quality of learning.
• Greater attention given to marking and grading, much of it
tending to lower self esteem of students, rather than providing
advice for improvement.
• A strong emphasis on comparing students with each other,
which demoralises the less successful learners.

14. Self-evaluation, 2
Where would you place your assessment practice on the
following continuum?
The main focus is on:
Quantity of
work/Presentation
Marking/Grading
Comparing
students
Quality of
Learning
Advice for
improvement
Identifying
individual
progress

15. The most powerful moderator that
enhances achievement is feedback
• The simplest prescription for improving
education must be “dollops of feedback”
….providing information about what a student does
and does not understand, and what direction the
student must take to improve.
Hattie (1999)

16. In summary
• Clarifying learning outcomes at the planning stage.
• Sharing learning outcomes at the beginning of the lesson.
• Involving student self assessment with the learning outcomes.
• Focusing oral and written feedback around the learning
outcomes.
• Organising individual goal setting so that student achievement
is based on what they already can do as well as aiming for the
next level.
• Use of rich questions that both challenge and guide the next
learning steps.
Practice drawn from the research base tends to consist of
the following:

17. What makes it difficult?

18. Traps for formative assessment in
secondary schools
• Believing that assessment is designed to ‘trick’ or ‘trap’ students and so
find out what they don’t know.
• Not knowing our curriculum documents and the difference between
achievement objectives and learning outcomes.
• Lack of understanding of the principles and theory of assessment
makes it difficult to decide what and how to assess.
• Assessing behaviour rather than quality of work.
• Confusing student self assessment with evaluation of the student or of
the teacher’s unit of work.
• Assuming students will understand how to self assess without teaching
them.
Hawk and Hill (2001)

19. Components of effective
formative assessment
 Plan, in detail, for all assessment
 Focus on formative assessment
 Share the learning outcomes and assessment expectations
with students
 Use clearly defined criteria
 Use examples and exemplars
 Give specific feedback and feed forward
 Incorporate student self assessment
 Students keep a record of their progress
 Teachers keep records of student progress.
Adapted from the IPDER ABeL model (2001)

20. This concludes the online workshop,
An Introduction to Formative Assessment
For Secondary School Teachers
For a theoretical perspective on assessment,
continue through the next six slides.
For an assessment reference list click here or go
to slide 27.

21. A Theoretical Perspective on
Assessment
Some food for thought!

22. Convergent and divergent models
Torrance and Pryor (1998) suggest a framework of convergent and
divergent models for formative assessment.
Convergent assessment aims to discover whether the learner knows,
understands or can do a pre-determined thing.
Divergent assessment aims to discover what the learner knows,
understands or can do.
List the assessment methods used in your department/ classroom.

23. The two approaches
The methods of assessment will vary according to whether the
teacher sees the task as convergent or divergent.
Convergent
•Tick-lists, can-do statements
•Closed questions
•Focus on contrasting errors
with correct responses
•Judgmental, quantitative
evaluation
•Student as a recipient of
assessments
•Precise planning and an
intention to stick to it
Divergent
•Open recordings, narratives
•Open-ended questions
•Focus on miscues which give
insights into the learner’s
understanding
•Student as an initiator and
recipient of assessment
•Flexible or complex planning, with
alternatives
•Descriptive rather than
judgmental evaluation
Match your methods with this list – which are convergent, which divergent?

24. Identifying the differences
Convergent assessment might be seen less as
formative assessment than as repeated summative
assessment, or continuous assessment.
Divergent assessment correlates more closely to
contemporary theories of learning, and accommodates
the complexity of formative assessment.

25. What they represent
• A behaviourist view of
learning.
• An intention to teach or
assess the next pre-
determined thing in a linear
progression.
• A view of assessment as
accomplished by the
teacher.
• A constructivist view of
learning.
• A non-linear development.
• A view of assessment as
accomplished jointly by the
teacher and the student.
Convergent assessment
represents:
Divergent assessment
represents:

26. Torrance and Pryor suggest approaching some
assessment tasks in a convergent manner, but also
argue that appreciating the two assessment modes and
moving from one to the other in a principled way, will
enhance the formative impact of classroom assessment.
How does this mesh with your view
of learning?
Torrance and Pryor (1998)

27. Assessment references
Abbott, J. (1999, January). Battery hens or free range chickens: What
kind of education for what kind of world? Journal of the 21st Century
Learning Initiative, 1–12.
Black, P. J., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning.
Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 5 (1), 7–74.
Clarke, S. (2001). Unlocking formative assessment: Practical strategies
for enhancing pupils’ learning in the primary classroom. London: Hodder
and Stoughton.
Clarke, S., Timperley, H., & Hattie, J. (2003). Unlocking formative
assessment: Practical strategies for enhancing pupils’ learning in the
primary and intermediate classroom (New Zealand ed.). Auckland:
Hodder Moa Beckett.
Gipps, C., McCallum, B., & Hargreaves, E. (2000). What makes a good
primary school teacher? London: Routledge Falmer.
more…

28. Assessment references, cont.
Green, J. M. (1998, February). Constructing the way forward for all
students. A speech delivered at “Innovations for Effective Schools”
OECD/New Zealand joint follow-up conference, Christchurch, New
Zealand.
Harlen, W. (1998) Classroom assessment: A dimension of
purposes and procedures. In K. Carr (Ed.), SAMEpapers (pp. 75–
87). Hamilton, New Zealand: Centre for Science, Mathematics and
Technology Educational Research, University of Waikato.
Harlen, W., Gipps, C., Broadfoot, P. & Nuttall, D. (1994)
Assessment and the improvement of education. Chapter 34 in
Moon, B. & Mayes, A.S. Teaching and Learning in the Secondary
School. London: Routledge / The Open University
Hattie, J. (1999, August). Influences on student learning.
Inaugural lecture: Professor of Education, University of Auckland.
more…

29. Assessment references, cont.
Hawk, K. & Hill, J. (2001) The Challenge of Formative Assessment
in Secondary Classrooms SPANZ Journal, September 2001.
Sadler, R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of
instructional systems. Instructional Science, 18, 119–44.
Torrance, H., & Pryor, J. (1998). Investigating formative
assessment: Teaching and learning in the classroom. Buckingham:
Open University Press.
Tunstall, P., & Gipps, C. (1996). Teacher feedback to young
children in formative assessment: A typology. British Educational
Research Journal, 22 (4).