What Is Formative Assessment

From beliefs in general we now turn to consider teachers’ beliefs- a term usually used to refer to teachers’ pedagogic beliefs or beliefs of relevance to an individual’s teaching. According to Pajares (1992), he stated that “teachers’ beliefs have a greater influence than the teachers’ knowledge on the way teachers plan their lessons, on the kinds of decisions they make, and on their general classroom practice (….) teachers can identify the level of students’ capacities… select and adjust their behavior and instructional choice accordingly.” From this perspective, he mentioned four main categories of educational beliefs, namely, “teacher efficacy” (affecting students’ performance); “epistemological beliefs” (regarding knowledge), “teachers’

Because the focus of this study is related to formative assessment, the researcher will spend more time on this. The term formative assessment is not used consistently in the literature (Bennett, 2011).There are some terms used interchangeably with formative assessment such as Classroom Evaluation (Crooks, 1988), Learning- Oriented Assessment (Pryor & Crossouard, 2008), Alternative Assessment (Berry, 2008), Assessment for Learning (Asghar, 2010) or Classroom-Based Assessment (Turner, 2012). A variety of definitions of the term ‘formative assessment’ have been proposed over the years by many researchers such as Black, Tunstall and Gipps, Black and William or Brown and so

A key characteristic is that the assessment information used by both teacher and pupils to modify their work in order to make it more effective”. In a similar vein, Tunstall and Gipps (1996) wrote “formative assessment means teachers using their judgments of children knowledge or understanding to feedback into the teaching process and to determine for individual children whether to re-explain the task/concept, to give further practice on it or move on the next stage”. (cited in Harry Torrance and John Pryor, 1998, p389). In addition, Black & Wiliam (1998) adopted a more restrictive definition by limiting the term to assessment conducted while learning was taking place. They defined formative assessment as a concept that teachers use information from activities to determine the next steps in learning and teaching. In their viewpoints, the information from a formative assessment actually is used to adjust instruction ‘to meet students’ needs”. In other words, these adjustments were not only to be made in the instruction but they needed to work. Likewise, Brown (2004) also stated this point in his definition. He defines formative assessment as “evaluating students in the process of ‘forming’ their competencies and skills with the goal of helping them to continue that growth process”, (p