Formative Assessment Essay

There has been much work on defining what assessment is. Many researchers such as Black and William, Bachman, Huhta or Berry have proposed the definitions of assessment.

Black and William (1998) hold the view that “teachers should see assessment as a tool to promote greater student achievement in the classroom context”. In this sense, assessment is a part of the teaching and learning process and is taken to support learning. Similarly, Bachman (2004) defined assessment as “a process of collecting information about something that we are interested in, according to procedures that are systematic and substantially grounded” (pp. 6-7). In the same way, Huhta referred to assessment as “all kinds of procedures used to assess individuals” (as cited

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). 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