September 2006 — Features
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Formative Assessment :: Building a Better Student
By testing academic performance at regular intervals, formative assessment strategies regard every child as a work in progress. 
To start, a question: What’s the difference between formative assessment and
summative assessment?
It’s not enough to say merely that formative assessment is a measure of student achievement administered several times during the school year, whereas summative assessment is a measure of student achievement usually administered at the end of the year. That’s only part of the answer; the true distinction between the two lies in their respective uses.
The goal of summative assessment is typically to provide an overall measure of student performance for someone outside the classroom—a report card for parents, an SAT score for college admissions officials. The consequences of this measure can be critical—being promoted or not, getting into college or not. By contrast, the goal of formative assessment is to provide feedback for someone inside the classroom—an indication of how well a student is doing in a given subject at a given level. The consequences are more immediate, such as individualized instruction. Broadly speaking, summative assessment answers the question “How did I do?”; formative assessment answers the question “How am I doing?” In the data that provides the answer to the latter question, the benefits of formative assessment are drawn. Those benefits are why formative assessment is in such demand today.
In their seminal essay, “Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment,” Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam cite D. Royce Sadler, a professor of higher education at Griffith University in Australia, writing: “When anyone is trying to learn, feedback about the effort has three elements: recognition of the desired goal, evidence about present position, and some understanding of a way to close the gap between the two.” So assessment in the classroom involves both student and teacher awareness of a goal—perhaps meeting a state standard, a baseline of knowledge, or a strategy of instruction.
So now that we’ve defined our terms, let’s move on to Winston- Salem, NC. That’s where Wes Leiphart, the assessment team manager for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, read the Black and Wiliam essay one day and thought, This is what we need. He brought the idea of standardized formative assessment to the superintendent and the principals in his district, and they told him to go for it.
