The prospect of "big data" at once evokes optimistic views of an information-rich future and concerns about surveillance that adversely impacts our personal and private lives. This overview article explores the implications of big data in education, focusing by way of example on data generated by student writing. We have chosen writing…

In this article, the author asserts that asking and responding to diagnostic questions is the single most important part of teaching secondary school mathematics. He notes the importance of formative assessment and recommends a formative assessment strategy that requires students to be public about their answers to questions, displaying their…

Over the past two decades, formative peer assessment has become a popular instructional approach. Initially, it was more readily applied in higher education but has since expanded to other educational levels, including primary and secondary education. The popularity is understandable given the increased amount of feedback by multiple peers and…

Assessment for learning (AfL) practices are commonly recommended as effective classroom strategies for providing teachers with information about student understanding. For teachers, the substantive potential of these AfL practices to inform student learning actions depends on what teachers notice and select as a focus and how they interpret and…

This study provides formative evaluation results from a pilot peer mentorship and teaching support program designed, implemented, and evaluated at a school of social work located in a major Midwestern Carnegie research I (RI) university over a 3-year span. Through utilizing an adult learning approach, the Teaching Excellence and Academic…

Establishing nuanced interpretations of student thinking is central to formative assessment but difficult, especially for preservice teachers. Learning progressions (LPs) have been proposed as a framework for promoting interpretations of students' thinking; however, research is needed to investigate whether and how an LP can be used to support…

The Teachers Conceptions of Assessment Inventory was used to investigate New Zealand teachers' beliefs about assessment. The participating sample comprised teachers who work almost exclusively at the senior level of high school and are responsible for school-based assessment programmes that contribute at least 50% of students' final grades towards…

For decades, formative assessment has been identified as a high-impact instructional practice that positively affects student learning. Education reform documents such as "Vision and Change: A Call to Action" expressly identify frequent, ongoing formative assessment and feedback as a key instructional practice in student-centered…

A key instructional change recommended by the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") is for teachers to be more explicit and systematic in teaching students science and engineering practices in addition to crosscutting concepts because the NGSS include a stronger focus on seamless teaching in three integrated dimensions…

The TAPS pyramid was developed in late 2014 and has been available as a download on the Primary Science Teaching Trust (PSTT) website since August 2015. But where has it gone since then? Who is using it? And how is it being used in schools to change primary science assessment practice? This article attempts to answer these questions with data from…

In this study, assessment and learning is reconceptualised as an integrated and dialogic process. Positioned in a sociocultural framework, the experiences of academics and students at an Australian university were examined to understand how they think about and participate in formative assessment to support learning. Semi-structured interviews and…

This paper describes the teaching of psychological report writing at Karolinska Institutet and the efforts to improve it through the introduction of formative assessment applied as peer and teacher review. 48 fourth-year psychology students were required to write a psychological report. Half of the students also participated in a non-mandatory…

This paper addresses the understanding of technological tools' influences on formative assessment in classrooms. From an extensive literature review we outline what is known about the role technology is playing in assisting teachers' assessment practice and how this is being done in primary and secondary school settings. A literature search…

Low- and middle-income countries have made significant progress getting children into school, but student learning and achievement are often dreadfully low (Berry, Barnett, & Hinton, 2015; Pritchett, 2013). Approximately 250 million children across the world are not acquiring basic reading and math skills, even though about half have spent at…

A key strategy to ensure learning is progressing is to integrate formative assessments into the instruction. This study focused on two areas related to formative assessments: the implementation and impact of formative assessments. Specifically, this study explored the perceptions of elementary, middle school, junior high, and high school teachers…