Taken together, these findings present a complex, and at times contradictory, view of teachers’ formative assessment practice, and the role that interim assessments play within that practice. It is clear that teachers interpret and act on the information generated through formative assessment of all types, but those actions are not always transformational. Half of the teachers studied employed primarily organizational strategies when acting on formative assessment information. All other things being equal, there is little reason to think that simply “repackaging” instruction—re-teaching specific content to specific students—will help students to understand content any better than they did prior to re-teaching. As noted in earlier chapters, however, all other things are not equal. The analysis presented in this chapter focuses on how teachers
responded to formative assessment information in their own classrooms, with their own students. In Cumberland, students identified as struggling had far greater access to instructional supports beyond the classroom than those in Philadelphia. It is possible that these individual or small-group interactions with mathematics tutors or specialists provided additional opportunities for conceptually oriented formative assessment. If this were the case, an organizational strategy for responding to interim assessment data might be appropriate. In Philadelphia, where such instructional supports were in short supply, it is more difficult to see how organizational strategies alone would contribute to improved student learning.
If the central goal of formative assessment is the improvement of instruction, then it is critical to attend to those factors and processes that contribute to instructional
change. Teachers who assessed for conceptual understanding were far more likely to employ instructional change strategies that those who did not. Further, teachers who focused on conceptual understanding using one type of formative assessment were more likely to do so for all types of assessment. This suggests that analytic or
diagnostic capacity is the key to effective formative assessment, regardless of whether those assessments are embedded within instruction, developed by teachers, or
externally designed. And while there is no doubt that the quality of assessment tools matters a great deal, it is worth noting that teachers with high capacity for analyzing formative assessment information were able to draw out ideas about students’
conceptual understandings even using interim assessments that were poorly suited for such analyses (see our note on validity of interim assessment for instructional use in chapter 4).
Teachers use different types of formative assessment for different purposes. Interim assessments are most often used to identify weak content areas or students within a class, while short-cycle practices are most often used to gather additional information about how students solved problems. Teacher-developed assessments played a similar role, but also had a post-assessment function, sometimes informing teachers’ pacing decisions. Interestingly, there appeared to be no relationship between the type of formative assessment used and the likelihood of assessing for conceptual understanding, or of employing instructional change strategies. Given the evidence base for short-cycle practices (Black & Wiliam, 1998), one might expect such practices to be more conceptually oriented than, for example, interim assessments. From this analysis, however, it appears that teacher capacity overrides these differences. This suggests that efforts to improve instruction through formative assessment should focus
first and foremost on the degree to which teachers are able to understand students’ thinking and reasoning based on assessment information.
There was considerable evidence that interim assessments structure and guide other types of formative assessment. In themselves, interim assessments appear limited in their capacity to inform teachers about students’ thinking or problem solving, but they give direction to short-cycle and teacher-developed assessments that may be better suited to that purpose. While the analysis presented here did not find that short- cycle or teacher developed formative assessment was more likely to be used
conceptually, the type of information generated by these assessments did appear to be better suited to conceptual diagnoses, as it provided teachers with more information about students’ reasoning and problem-solving processes. This suggests that while there is little evidence that directly associates interim assessments with improved student learning, such assessments may play an important role within a broader system of formative assessment. Such systems are currently the focus of several development efforts (Herman, et al., 2006; Shavelson, et al., 2008).
This analysis suggests that future research should focus to a greater extent on how different types of formative assessment—both tools and processes—interact with and support one another within the context of teachers’ practice. Specific attention should be given to what combinations or sequences of assessment use are most likely to help teachers to understand students’ thinking, and the types of professional
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