My Opinion About Formative Assessment

According to Lang, et al (2008), the formative assessment process came from educators working on ways to accelerate student achievement and help predict how students will perform on standards-based state-wide tests.

In my opinion, the formative assessment is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides explicit feedback to adjust on-going teaching and learning to improve students’ achievement of intended instructional outcomes.

Formative assessment focuses more on the process rather than the grading. Apart of that it also helps to monitor student learning in order to provide on-going feedbacks that can be used by instructors to improve their way of teaching and also by the students to improve their learning.

On the other hand, it helps to identify the student’s strengths and weaknesses. By doing so, teachers can target the areas that need to be worked on. For example, a student can correct conceptual errors before undertaking work on a term paper. As that student works on the term paper, input from the teacher can inform, guide and validate each step of the writing process.

In very simple terms, formative assessments, unlike summative assessments, allow the student and teacher to form a more detailed understanding of the student’s abilities, which can be used to inform remediation, re-teaching and instructional strategy.

With formative assessment, we work with students; we don’t do something to students. We seek to use the data from formative assessments to help the student master the curriculum and help the student identify his or her strengths and weaknesses.

This is a shift in the classic educational paradigm. Formative assessment allows students to concentrate their efforts on specific areas and hence improve overall performance.