Formative Assessment Disadvantages

Another argument in favour of Afl is that the teacher makes use of the formative assessments to enforce the intrinsic value of education to the children rather than on the extrinsic value. Also, motivate the children to polish their strong points but at the same time be focused on furnishing the skills at which they have a lower proficiency (OECD, 2008). I realised this in my teaching experience where the learning objective was the understanding of the imperative verbs. I started my lesson with a warm-up activity to identify the children’s understanding of nouns and verbs. During that activity, I realised most of the children were not sure about the concept of the noun and verb. By the use of this Afl approach, I diverted my teaching to clarify

A child suggested defining noun as PPT (person, place, and thing) to make it easier to remember. This lesson made me believe that formative assessment not only helps the teacher to assess children’s need but also facilitates real-time feedback, children taking ownership of their learning, which promotes intrinsic value of education.
For the purpose of understanding Afl, it is important to identify the theories underpinning it. There is no one theory behind the Assessment for learning. In fact, Afl is based on a combination of works of research. The Afl approach is linked to the teaching and learning pedagogy and is driven by the social constructivist theory and Bloom’s model of mastery learning Bloom et al. (1971). Afl helps learners to understand and deepens their thinking and as a result the learning process becomes visible. This supports Stobart’s views that

It helps in filling the gap between a learner’s present understanding and their goals in learning.In spite of such an insightful definition for Afl, research by William F Boyle and Marie Charles has found that most of the teachers are not very clear in their understanding about Afl. The research found out that most of the teachers find themselves lost in the clutter of terminology used for Formative assessment, e.g. Formative assessment(FA); continuous assessment; assessment for learning (Afl); gimmicks like WALT, LO, WILFs, LI, etc.). The survey and the case study highlighted that most teachers misunderstood Afl to be similar to supplied schemes of work like numeracy, literacy, etc. and would apply some strategies to achieve Afl. During the survey, one of the teachers inquired ‘if there is a pack for Afl’, which spotlighted the misconception of the teachers Boyle, et al. (2014). Therefore, it is important to express the theory of formative assessment in relation to the actual classroom practice Allal& Lopez(2005) as cited in Boyle, et al.