It is important for teachers, and all educators for that matter, to become fully aware of the power of formative assessments. This is because the formative-assessment process leads to considerable gains in students’ learning. Like the research conducted for the reading comprehension process, we have four decades’ worth of empirical evidence attesting to the instructional dividends of the formative-assessment process. The unfortunate reality is that this extraordinary knowledge base is rarely understood or used in the every day teaching practices in most classrooms.

            Dr. James Popham, a noted assessment expert, wrote recently that he reviewed more than 4,000 research investigations that showed clearly that when the formative assessment process was well implemented in the classroom, it could essentially double the speed of student learning. Popham went on to say that when one considers several recent reviews of research regarding the classroom formative-assessment process, it was clear that the process works, it can produce enormous gains in students’ achievement, and it is sufficiently robust so that different teachers can use it in diverse ways, yet still get great results with their students. Amazing! These findings suggest that even when teachers apply the process differently results are consistently strong.

            The formative-assessment process involves teachers’ and/or students’ use of assessment evidence to make adjustments in what they’re doing. This assessment evidence can be gathered in a variety of ways—from traditional written tests to a wide range of informal assessment procedures, such as securing students’ self-reports of their own understanding of an issue.

            This process revolves around the use of assessments to collect evidence, and then the employment of such evidence by teachers and/or students to decide whether they need to adjust what they are doing. The formative-assessment process uses assessments as an integral tactic to determine whether any adjustments are needed.

            An assessment is an important part of the formative-assessment process, but it is only that—a part of the formative-assessment process. The entire process involves decisions about when to test and what to test, selection or construction of suitable assessment procedures, judgments about whether assessment-elicited evidence should lead to adjustments, and choices about the nature of any adjustments. Assessments are a key component of the formative-assessment process, but they are not the entire process. Many American educators regard formative assessment as a type of test-an unfortunate misconception.

            “Summative assessments” are regarded by many educators as the tests used to make evaluative judgments about a completed instructional sequence. The most obvious examples of summative assessments these days are the large-scale accountability tests administered annually by states to appraise the effectiveness of their schools and districts. But summative assessments can also refer to classroom assessments such as an end-of-course exam that a teacher might use to determine how well the teacher’s students have learned what the teacher was trying to teach.

            Popham writes that “Formative assessments” are typically thought of as those along-the-way classroom tests that teachers create to help them and their students get a fix on how well students are learning what they are supposed to learn. That’s because it’s not the test per se that is formative or summative. It is the use to which the test’s results are put.