What makes an assessment formative?

How many of your students say "Is this formative or summative?" every time you assign them a task?  On one hand, this is great.  Our students are at least somewhat interested in how we will be viewing their work and to what extent that work will impact their grade.  On the other hand, it is an unnecessary question...and not necessarily for the reasons you may be thinking right now.

Let's start with a simpler question...what makes an assessment formative?  Although I called this a "simpler" question it is anything but simple.  Don't believe me? Ask it to your colleagues at your next faculty meeting.  Unless you are in a school that has put loads of work into assessments to get to the point where you are using common language and understanding, you will find many educators do not give the same response.  This is not altogether a terrible event.  Quite the opposite, it is an opportunity to have deep, valuable discussions about assessment practices and assessment literacy.  I witnessed this first-hand at the beginning of the semester during a pre-service meeting when a slightly different question was asked.  The question posed to our faculty was "What do you think of when you think of formative assessment?"  The question was asked to teachers in all divisions, PK - 12.  The answers were just as diverse as the audience to which it was asked.  The responses were not terribly shocking to me.  I knew through various conversations with my colleagues that, as a faculty, we had many different definitions of what "formative" meant.  This includes within each division, and sometimes within a single department/grade level.  I give the administration credit for asking this question.  It shows awareness of the differing of interpretations of this within our school.  Now that the question has been asked, we can begin to address it from all sides.

Side note: Our school has recently gone through a major overhaul of our grading system.  We are transitioning from a traditional model of grading and reporting to a standards-based model of grading and reporting.  One of the shifts that have happened has been the adoption of the terms formative and summative.  These are the only two categories that a task can be labeled in our grade book.  Hence, for the most part, the question from the students.  

Getting back to the question...what does make an assessment formative?  In his article posted in Phi Delta Kappan magazine in December 2005, Rick Stiggins, the founder and President of the Assessment Training Institute, states that formative assessments "provide students, teachers, and parents with a continuing stream of evidence of student progress in mastering the knowledge and skills" that are being assessed as well as give feedback to the teacher about what teaching practices work/don't work throughout the process.  Great.  So, what does this mean?  (This question may also lead to a very interesting discussion in your department/division.)  There are two points that you should focus on if you are trying to determine whether or not a task/assessment can be considered a formative assessment.  The first point to consider is whether or not at the completion of the task the students will be better informed of what they know and/or what gaps they may still need to fill.  This can be accomplished using a multitude of different tasks and can be done in countless ways both in and outside of the classroom with or without the use of technology.  The second point is what you, as a teacher, do with the results from the task.

BUT there is more to this than just assigning and marking a task.  First, the teacher must give the students feedback about their knowledge and understanding of the learning target(s) that the task was/are being assessed.  Second, the teacher must determine whether or not the results/data gained from the task will guide the teachers' next steps of instruction (and sometimes make an on-the-spot decision to alter the current lesson).  Without the process of feedback and determination of next steps, the task is simply practice which is not a formative assessment.  For example, if you give your students a task to do, traditional homework is a great example of this, and then only check to see if they completed said task but do not view every students' individual response, don't give feedback about their response(s), and then don't use this information to set up current/future lessons you have only assigned a practice task.  There is nothing wrong with practice tasks, students need to practice tasks before they are assessed.  The fault is saying that these practice tasks are formative.

Here is another situation to consider.  Typically, an end of unit assessment is considered a summative assessment.  Think about the last summative you gave in your class when all of your students performed either at or above your expectations.  Now, think about that summative you gave where many, maybe even all, of your students did not do as well as you had expected.  Did you do anything different after the unsuccessful assessment?  Did you go back and possibly reteach a key concept or two because you knew that concept was going to appear again in a future assessment?  If you just put the students' marks in the grade book and carried on with the pacing guide, then that assessment is not one you can consider a formative assessment.  If we are being honest here, many of us have probably done this at least one time in our career.  Sadly, I am guilty of this myself, especially in my first few years of teaching, but now I see the benefits of focusing on learning and not teaching.  If, however, you gave feedback to your students about their progress and then you went back and re-taught a topic, or gave a mini-lesson about any of the items on the assessment, or intentionally altered your next lessons to include a revision of the missed concept(s) then you can consider your assessment a formative assessment.   And yes, it is ok to call an end of unit assessment a formative assessment while at the same time it is ok to take the data from a proposed formative assessment and use it as data toward a determination of summative assessment mark.  (If a student has mastered a learning target, they cannot unmaster it.)  If you wish to look into this more deeply, check out Common Formative Assessments 2.0 by Larry Ainsworth.

As you can see these two situations are extremely different and will have different outcomes based on what you as the teacher do with the data you gather from your students.  As teachers, we formatively assess our students all the time.  We may not (and I need to say should not) record these assessments formally in our grade books and the students may not even know they are being assessed.  The important things are that you know what your students are/are not learning and the students are getting constant feedback about their learning, which in the end is what is important.  Classroom discussions (these are actual two-way discussions, lectures are not discussions), exit tickets, quick online quiz games like Kahoot!, Quizizz, Go Formative, Quizlet, in-class partner or independent work, the list goes on and on for possible formative assessments that are not the traditional quiz/test.  There is still room for the paper & pencil assessments, but don't make them your only formative assessment.  Be creative in your search for student data.

To come back to the original pondering (again) of what makes an assessment formative, the answer is simple.  What happens after the task determines whether the assessment is formative, summative, or just practice.  It is what you do with the assessment that determines what kind of assessment it is, not what is contained in the assessment itself.  To borrow from He-Man, a childhood cartoon favorite of mine, "By the power of the Grade Book, YOU have the power!" to determine what you do with the assessment data you gather from each assessment you give your students.