It’s been a while since I encountered Dylan William — the man with a first name as a last name and vice versa. I was introduced by the drummer in my old band, Tommy Lucassi. This is still the pedagogical model that I lean on in most of what I do. But unfortunately, I am an unstructured improviser. And I am far from fully learned, and the project of making formative pedagogy work within online vocational higher education is, to say the least, ongoing.
But what does it mean?
The understanding of formative assessment lies in the distinction between summative and formative assessment. Simply put, formative assessment is about instructing the student on what they need to do to achieve the learning objectives, instead of just conveying that you got 7 out of 10 correct on the test. However, it’s not really about which test you use, but how you use the information the test generates. If the information is used to assign a grade, its function is summative; if it’s used to shape the next step in teaching, it’s formative.
The most effective formative assessment occurs in short cycles – minute by minute and day by day in the ongoing interaction with students.
The three core questions
Regardless of which theoretical model one starts from, the formative process always boils down to teachers and students together seeking answers to three fundamental questions:
- Where are we going? (Feed-up) – Clarifying and creating understanding of learning objectives and success criteria. Students must understand the purpose and what quality actually means to be able to engage.
- Where are we now? – Regularly checking in and gathering evidence of where students are in their learning in relation to the goals. This happens through questions, discussions, and short check-ins during the lesson itself.
- How do we move forward? (Feed-forward) – Using the information to adjust teaching, provide targeted feedback, and give students concrete tools to close the gap between current knowledge and the goal.
Five key strategies for success
To operationalize these questions in everyday life, the process is often described through five central strategies where responsibility is shared between the teacher, the group, and the individual:
- Clarify, share, and understand learning objectives and success criteria: Making the goals understandable. This is best done by looking at concrete work samples and examples rather than complex matrices.
- Create effective discussions and tasks that make learning visible: Designing activities that act as “detectives” to quickly reveal misunderstandings and show what students have actually understood.
- Provide feedback that moves learning forward: Feedback should be specific, actionable, and focus on the task and process, not on the student’s ego or person. Pure comment writing without grades is often the most effective.
- Activate students as resources for each other: Through peer assessment and collaborative work, students help each other develop. The focus is on improving a piece of work, not on grading it.
- Activate students as owners of their own learning: The ultimate goal of formative assessment is to develop students’ metacognition and self-regulation so that they can assess and manage their own learning.
In short: Formative assessment arises from the insight that students don’t always learn exactly what we teach. We need to find out what they have actually understood before we can move on.
But all of this is extremely challenging with online teaching. The fact that students most often have their cameras turned off makes it incredibly difficult for me as an educator to read the group. But I’ll delve into that later.