This study focuses on teachers' use of informal formative assessments (IFAs) aimed at improving students' learning and teachers' recognition of students' learning processes. The study was designed as an explorative case study of four middle school teachers and their students at a charter school in the northeastern U.S.A. The data collected for the…

Assessment is a complex function requiring an understanding of student learning, assessment principles, practices, and purposes of data to implement effective classroom assessment. The purpose of this study was to add to the growing base of knowledge about teachers' engagement with assessment data and their motivation for classroom assessment.…

Written in a refreshing conversational style, this text thoroughly prepares students, program administrators, and new evaluators to conduct evaluations or to use them in their work. The book's question-driven focus and clear discussions about the importance of fostering evaluation use by building collaborative relationships with stakeholders set…

This article explores the relationship between the lack of visible attention to formative assessment in degree specifications and its marginalization in practice. Degree specification documents form part of the quality apparatus emphasizing the accountability and certification duties of assessment. Ironically, a framework designed to assure…

With the need to meet a set of higher accountability standards such as Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards and the AYP benchmarks of the NCLB Act, for example, school principals are faced with the knowledge that they play a vital role in school effectiveness as well as teacher retention, parent participation, and…

Local assessment systems are being marketed as formative, benchmark, predictive, and a host of other terms. Many so-called formative assessments are not at all similar to the types of assessments and strategies studied by Black and Wiliam (1998) but instead are interim assessments. In this article, we clarify the definition and uses of interim…

A long-held ambition for many educators and assessment experts has been to integrate summative and formative assessments so that data from external assessments used for system monitoring may also be used to shape teaching and learning in classrooms. In turn, classroom-based assessments may provide valuable data for decision makers at school and…

This article chronicles the evolution of a large research extensive institution's General Education writing assessment efforts from an initial summative focus to a formative, improvement focus. The methods of assessment, which changed as the assessment purpose evolved, are described. As more data were collected, the measurement tool was…

This article reports on a formative and internal evaluation of teacher induction practices for newly hired teachers in a US university ESL program. By adopting a utilization-focused approach, evaluators produced a design that was articulated to the information needs of the evaluation users. The ensuing findings were then used to develop and…

Based on the results of a generalizability study of measures of teacher knowledge for teaching mathematics developed at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at the University of California, Los Angeles, this article provides evidence that teachers are better at drawing reasonable inferences about student…

Assessments labeled as formative have been offered as a means to improve student achievement. But labels can be a powerful way to miscommunicate. For an assessment use to be appropriately labeled "formative," both empirical evidence and reasoned arguments must be offered to support the claim that improvements in student achievement can be linked…

This report describes the purposes of benchmark assessments and provides recommendations for selecting and using benchmark assessments--addressing validity, alignment, reliability, fairness and bias and accessibility, instructional sensitivity, utility, and reporting issues. We also present recommendations on building capacity to support schools'…

In many school districts, the pressure to raise test scores has created overnight celebrity status for formative assessment. Its powers to raise student achievement have been touted, however, without attending to the research on which these claims were based. Sociocultural learning theory provides theoretical grounding for understanding how…

This article explores the relationships between kinds of evaluations, analytic methods, and interpersonal processes and the acceptance of recommendations by decision makers. Detailed typologies based on a review of the literature provide the basis for quantitatively testing concepts about the utilization of evaluations against empirical data.…

Areas of evaluation are identified in which the formative/summative distinction appears inadequate: (1) knowledge-generating evaluations aimed at conceptual use; (2) developmental evaluation; and (3) use of evaluation to support intervention or empower participants. An argument is also made for the effectiveness of feedback that cannot be…