Formative assessment combines purposeful design with responsive teaching to support student progress.
Formative assessment brings together assessment design and classroom practice to support teaching and improve student learning. It is most powerful when intentionally designed and seamlessly embedded into everyday teaching. Formative assessment involves implementing assessments that align with the curriculum and using them during teaching to gather purposeful and manageable evidence of students’ learning. Teachers use this evidence to adapt their teaching, respond to student needs, and guide learning towards curriculum expectations and progress over time.
Formative assessment is a key part of a comprehensive assessment system. Within this system, its distinct role is to provide real-time, ongoing insights into how students are progressing and what they need to do next to reach achievement standards. Formative assessment is not like summative assessment, which measures learning at specific points in time to determine final learning outcomes. It is not like diagnostic tools, which offer a snapshot of student strengths and gaps before teaching begins. Formative assessment actively informs classroom teaching as learning happens and should be used regularly and purposefully alongside summative and diagnostic assessment.
As we make these resources more widely available, we welcome any further feedback from schools and other stakeholders as we develop the next suite of resources.