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Guided assessmentGuided assessment
The emphasis of the National Curriculum Guide for Compulsory Schools on formative assessment is clearly evident both when discussing assessment in general and also in discussing subject areas.
From the National Curriculum Guide for Primary Schools
Teachers need to help students make realistic self-assessments, explain to them the goals of their studies and how to move towards them. Emphasis should be placed on formative assessment, where students regularly reflect on their studies with their teachers to approach their own goals in the studies and decide where to go. Students need to be clear about the criteria that are used as a basis for the assessment.
The term formative assessment has been defined in a variety of ways, and more terms have emerged to describe the learning culture in which students become aware of their position in relation to learning objectives and reflect with teachers on ways to achieve them. There has been a certain development from talking about formative assessment to guided learning, where the role of the student is more focused on becoming aware of their position in learning. Here, the term formative assessment will be used where it appears in the National Curriculum Guide.
Formative assessment is an assessment whose main purpose is to provide students with feedback that allows them to improve their performance based on the assessment.
Assessment that enhances learning is based on students knowing where they are headed and being guided on how to get there. It is important that students actively participate by reflecting on their learning and teachers need to adapt teaching to the results of assessment.
Assessment has a guiding value if it looks at indicators of student achievement. Teachers, students and peers then interpret the indicators and use them to make decisions about the next steps in the learning and teaching process. In this way, decisions about learning and teaching are more likely to be better or more well-informed than those that would have been made without the indicators on which the formative assessment was based (Black and Williams, 2009).
Assessments can be used both as formative and summative assessments. What distinguishes them is what is done with the assessment.
The teacher administers a test and records the students’ performance. If nothing else is done with the assessment, this is a summative assessment, not a formative assessment. However, the results of the test can give the teacher clues that he can use to guide the students’ progress and where further support is needed. In this way, the same assessment can serve as both a summative assessment (indicating the students’ progress in specific aspects of the learning process) and a formative assessment (indicating the next steps in the teaching and learning process). Some assessment methods may be appropriate for use in formative assessment, while others are more useful for summative assessment.
- Anyone, teacher, student, or peer, can use formative assessment and provide formative feedback.
- The focus of a formative assessment is on the decisions made following it.
- It increases the likelihood of success and learning if decisions about the next steps in the process are based on indicators of success or status.
- Formative assessment is useful in all subjects.
- Teachers and students must know what students are supposed to learn in order to know what indicators indicate that learning has occurred and, on that basis, make decisions about the next steps in the process.
- The fact is that students do not always learn what they are taught, and therefore it is important for teachers to know ways to get clues about what they learned to base the next steps in the learning process on.
(in the definition of Black and Williams)
Guided assessment
