Formative assessment
Formative assessment is about learning in progress. It involves helping learners to keep moving forward and needs to be done on an ongoing basis. It's an opportunity for you and the learner to identify:
- what the learner has grasped since they started on the course or programme
- how far they are able to apply what they have learned to new tasks and in new situations; and
- prior learning that wasn't revealed through initial assessment.
It will also help you to:
- gain insights into how best to help the learner acquire new knowledge, skills and understanding
- provide them with guidance on how to make progress; and
- renegotiate learning outcomes and goals if necessary.
Most tutors practise assessment by observing how learners go about things and making mental notes about how to help them. This is an essential aspect of teaching, but it's only one approach, and it's often done intuitively without sharing the insights gained with learners.
Three tips on formative assessment:
- Give learners more explicit feedback on what you observe and more focused guidance on how to improve. This turns observation into a tool for learning and learner motivation.
- Extend the range of methods you use for formative assessment to cover more aspects of learning. Find ways of getting learners to reveal more, not just about what they have learned, but about how they approach learning and how they feel about it.
- Develop the methods and approaches you use in the ordinary course of your teaching more fully so that they can be used for assessment purposes.
If you are a Subject Learning Coach, make sure you discuss these tips with your colleagues — you may discover more.