Formative Assessment: Getting the Focus Right

Formative assessment: getting the focus right Dylan Wiliam, ETS Writing in 1967, Michael Scriven suggested two roles that evaluation might play.On the one hand, " it may have a role in the on-going improvement of the curriculum" (Scriven, 1967 p.41) while in another role, " the evaluation process may serve to enable administrators to decide whether the entire finished curriculum, refined by use of the evaluation process in its first role, represents a sufficiently significant advance on the available alternatives to justify the expense of adoption by a school system" (pp.41-42).He then proposed "to use the terms 'formative' and 'summative' evaluation to qualify evaluation in these roles."(p.43).Two years later, Benjamin Bloom suggested that the same distinction might be applied to the evaluation of student learning-what we today would tend to call "assessment".He acknowledged the traditional role that tests played in judging and classifying students, but noted that there was another role for evaluation:Quite in contrast is the use of "formative evaluation" to provide feedback and correctives at each stage in the teaching-learning process.By formative evaluation we mean evaluation by brief tests used by teachers and students as aids in the learning process.While such tests may be graded and used as part of the judging and classificatory function of evaluation, we see much more effective use of formative evaluation if it is separated from the grading process and used primarily as an aid to teaching (Bloom 1969, p.48)