Three Characteristics Of Formative Assessment

Our second best practice, formative assessments, “provide insights into learning in progress. Timed well, they can reveal issues of misunderstanding or confusion before they become obstacles to student learning” (Martin-Kniep & Picone-Zocchia, 2009, p. 73). Most assessments should be formative and, if aligned to Learning Targets, useful for both the teacher and the student to better understand the knowledge and misunderstandings held about content, or strengths and gaps in skills. Marin-Kniep & Picone-Zocchia (2009) identify three characteristic of formative assessment; they occur during the course of student learning, not at the end; their purpose is to monitor student learning; and they provide data to the teacher to adjust instruction to better meet the learning needs of students (p. 74). Through this lens, formative assessments are another means to gain strategic data points for all students that allow a teacher to be proactive rather than reactive or inactive before a summative assessment occurs. After all, “the aim of teaching is not to master state tests, but to meet worthy intellectual standards. We must recapture the primary aim of assessment: to help students better learn and teachers to better instruct.” (Wiggins,

If you learned only by rote, however, a novel question will stump you… [Therefore] students who received assignments requiring more challenging intellectual work also achieved greater than average gains on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills in reading and mathematics… [proving that] assignments calling for more authentic intellectual work actually improve student scores on conventional tests" (para.