1. Formative assessment: definitions and relationships
PARLO meeting; October 2011
Dylan Wiliam

2. Origins and antecedents
Feedback (Wiener, 1948)
Developing range-finders for anti-aircraft guns
Effective action requires a closed system within which
Actions taken within the system are evaluated
Evaluation of the actions leads to modification of future actions
Two kinds of loops
Positive (bad: leads to collapse or explosive growth)
Negative (good: leads to stability)
“Feedback is information about the gap between the actual level and the reference level of a system parameter which is used to alter the gap in some way” (Ramaprasad, 1983 p. 4)
Feedback and instructional correctives (Bloom)

3. What’s wrong with the feedback metaphor?
In education
In engineering
Feedback is any information given to the student about their current performance
… or at best, information that compares current performance with desired performance
Much rarer is information that can be used by learners to improve
That’s just data
That’s just a thermostat
That’s a feedback system

4. A blossoming of research reviews…
Fuchs & Fuchs (1986)
Natriello (1987)
Crooks (1988)
Bangert-Drowns, et al. (1991)
Dempster (1991, 1992)
Elshout-Mohr (1994)
Kluger & DeNisi (1996)
Black & Wiliam (1998)
Nyquist (2003)
Brookhart (2004)
Allal & Lopez (2005)
Köller (2005)
Brookhart (2007)
Wiliam (2007)
Hattie & Timperley (2007)
Shute (2008)

5. Effects of feedback
Kluger & DeNisi (1996) review of3000 research reports
Excluding those:
without adequate controls
with poor design
with fewer than 10 participants
where performance was not measured
without details of effect sizes
left 131 reports, 607 effect sizes, involving 23,363 observations of 12,652 individuals
On average, feedback increases achievement (d =0.41)
Effect sizes highly variable (sd>1)
38% (50 out of 131) of effect sizes were negative

6. Effects of formative assessment
Standardized effect size: differences in means, measured in population standard deviations
Source
Effect size
Kluger & DeNisi (1996)
0.41
Black &Wiliam (1998)
0.4 to 0.7
Wiliam et al., (2004)
0.32
Hattie & Timperley (2007)
0.96
Shute (2008)
0.4 to 0.8

7. Problems with effect sizes
Restriction of range
Sensitivity to instruction
Ambiguous comparisons

8. Definitions of formative assessment
We use the general term assessment to refer to all those activities undertaken by teachers—and by their students in assessing themselves—that provide information to be used as feedback to modify teaching and learning activities. Such assessment becomes formative assessment when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching to meet student needs” (Black & Wiliam, 1998 p. 140) “the process used by teachers and students to recognise and respond to student learning in order to enhance that learning, during the learning” (Cowie & Bell, 1999 p. 32) “assessment carried out during the instructional process for the purpose of improving teaching or learning” (Shepard et al., 2005 p. 275)

9. “Formative assessment refers to frequent, interactive assessments of students’ progress and understanding to identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately” (Looney, 2005, p. 21) “A formative assessment is a tool that teachers use to measure student grasp of specific topics and skills they are teaching. It’s a ‘midstream’ tool to identify specific student misconceptions and mistakes while the material is being taught” (Kahl, 2005 p. 11)

10. “Assessment for Learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there” (Broadfoot et al., 2002 pp. 2-3) Assessment for learning is any assessment for which the first priority in its design and practice is to serve the purpose of promoting students’ learning. It thus differs from assessment designed primarily to serve the purposes of accountability, or of ranking, or of certifying competence. An assessment activity can help learning if it provides information that teachers and their students can use as feedback in assessing themselves and one another and in modifying the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes “formative assessment” when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs. (Black et al., 2004 p. 10)

11. Which of these is formative?
A science adviser uses test results to plan professional development workshops for teachers
Teachers doing item-by-item analysis of 4th grade math tests to review their curriculum
A school tests students every 10 weeks to predict which students are “on course” to pass a big test
“Three fourths” of the way through a unit test
Exit pass question: “What is the difference between mass and weight?”
“Sketch the graph of y equals one over one plus x squared on your mini-dry-erase boards.”

12. What does formative assessment form?
Cycle length
Long
Medium
Short
Curriculum alignment ✔
Monitoring progress
Student involved assessment
Student engagement
Teacher cognition about learning
Responsive classroom practice

13. Formative assessment: a new definition
“An assessment functions formatively to the extent that evidence about student achievement elicited by the assessment is interpreted and used to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions that would have been taken in the absence of that evidence.” (Wiliam, 2009) Formative assessment involves the creation of, and capitalization upon, moments of contingency in the regulation of learning processes.

14. Unpacking formative assessment
Key processes
Establishing where the learners are in their learning
Establishing where they are going
Working out how to get there
Participants
Teachers
Peers
Learners

15. Aspects of formative assessment
Where the learner is going
Where the learner is
How to get there
Teacher
Clarify and share learning intentions
Engineering effective discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
Providing feedback that moves learners forward
Peer
Understand and share learning intentions
Activating students as learning
resources for one another
Learner
Understand learning intentions
Activating students as owners of their own learning

16. Five “key strategies”…
Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
curriculum philosophy
Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
classroom discourse, interactive whole-class teaching
Providing feedback that moves learners forward
feedback
Activating students as learning resources for one another
collaborative learning, reciprocal teaching, peer-assessment
Activating students as owners of their own learning
metacognition, motivation, interest, attribution, self-assessment
(Wiliam & Thompson, 2007)

17. Dual-pathway model (Boekaerts, 1993)
“It is assumed that students who are invited to participate in a learning activity use three sources of information to form a mental representation of the task-in-context and to appraise it: (1) current perceptions of the task and the physical, social, and instructional context within which it is embedded; (2) activated domain-specific knowledge and (meta)cognitive strategies related to the task; and (3) motivational beliefs, including domain-specific capacity, interest and effort beliefs.” (Boekaerts, 2006, p. 349)

18. Growth and well-being
Share learning goals with students so that they are able to monitor their own progress toward them.
Promote the belief that ability is incremental rather than fixed; when students think they can’t get smarter, they are likely to devote their energy to avoiding failure.
Make it more difficult for students to compare themselves with others in terms of achievement.
Provide feedback that contains a recipe for future action rather than a review of past failures.
Use every opportunity to transfer executive control of the learning from the teacher to the students to support their development as autonomous learners.