1. Quality in formative assessment
Symposium at the 2008 meeting of AERA, New York, NY
Discussant: Dylan Wiliam

2. Formative assessment
Formative assessment involves the creation of, and the capitalization upon, moments of contingency in instruction

3. What gets formed? Long-cycle Span: across units, terms
Length: four weeks to one year
Impact: Student monitoring; curriculum alignment
Medium-cycle
Span: within and between teaching units
Length: one to four weeks
Impact: Improved, student-involved, assessment; teacher cognition about learning; before end-of-unit adjustment to instruction.
Short-cycle
Span: within and between lessons
Length:
day-by-day: 24 to 48 hours
minute-by-minute: 5 seconds to 2 hours
Impact: classroom practice; student engagement

4. For whom? Individual students
Groups of students on whom data were collected
Other groups of students

5. Theory of action
Evidence of student learning is elicited (by teachers, peers, or by the learners themsleves)
This evidence is intepreted in terms of a theory of learning
Decisions about next steps in instruction are taken that are either better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited

6. Competing definitions of quality
What is effective formative assessment?
Data is generated for the purpose of improving instruction (intention)
Data is generated that is likely to improve instruction (prediction)
Under any conditions
Under commonly encountered conditions
Under specified conditions
Data is generated that actually improves instruction (action)

7. Evidence collection Kinds of assessment in support of learning
Monitoring
Whether the required learning is taking place
Diagnostic
When the required learning is not taking place, what is not being learned
Formative
When the required learning is not taking place, what needs to be done to improve the situation
Evidence collection must be driven by a theory of learning

8. Learning progressions
“Unpacking” state standards
Horizontal unpacking—operationalization for testing
Vertical unpacking—operationalization for learning
Learning progressions
Are rarely independent of curriculum
Require both empirical and theoretical rationales

9. The role of content knowledge
Knowing what the correct answer is
Knowing what incorrect answers indicate
Knowing what instructional activities are likely to move learning on
Knowing what issues are worth bothering about

10. Specific comments Herman & Choi An important existence proof
A particularly well understood, and curriculum-independent, domain
How much accuracy is needed?
Heritage, Kim & Vendlinski
Importance of teacher x principle x task effects
Planning next instruction is hard
Requires an “anatomy of quality”
Wylie & Ciofalo
Competing priorities
Minimizing false positives
Interpretability of true negatives