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Introduction

In 1984, I left my job teaching mathematics and science in an urban public school in London to join a research project at the University of London that was exploring the potential of formative assessment to improve student learning. Over a quarter of a century later, this book is the result of that journey.

The book has two main purposes. The first is to provide simple, practical ideas about changes that every teacher can make in the classroom to develop his or her practice of teaching. The second is to provide the evidence that these changes will result in improved outcomes for learners.

In chapter 1, I show why educational achievement is so important and why raising educational achievement needs to be a priority. With higher levels of educational achievement, people are healthier, live longer, contribute more to society, and earn more money. For society, the benefits include reduced criminal justice costs, reduced health care costs, and increased economic growth.

I also outline briefly how previous attempts at reform—including changes to the structure of schooling, to the governance of schools, and to the curriculum, and an increased role for digital technology—have been largely ineffective. These reform efforts have failed to take into account three crucial points.

1. The quality of teachers is the single most important factor in the education system.

2. Teacher quality is highly variable.

3. Teacher quality has a greater impact on some students than others.

In chapter 1, I also show that attempts at improving the quality of entrants into teaching and removing the least effective teachers will result in small effects that will take a generation to materialize. The fundamental argument of chapter 1, therefore, is that to secure our future economic prosperity, we need to help the teachers who are already serving in our schools improve.

In chapter 2, I explore some of the ways that teachers might develop, and estimate how big an impact these changes would have on student outcomes. I show that some popular initiatives, such as learning styles, have no discernible impact on student achievement at all, while others, such as increasing teacher content knowledge, do improve student learning but by much less than people generally assume.

In the second part of chapter 2, I summarize the research on classroom formative assessment practices and show that these practices appear to have a much greater impact on educational achievement than most other reforms. Chapter 2 concludes by outlining what formative assessment is, and what it is not, and presents the five key strategies of formative assessment.

Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 deal in turn with each of the five key strategies of formative assessment.

1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and success criteria

2. Eliciting evidence of learning

3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward

4. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another

5. Activating learners as owners of their own learning

In each of these five chapters, I present a summary of the research evidence that shows the impact of the strategy, and I offer a number of practical techniques that teachers have used—some in the literature, and others in classrooms that I have observed—to incorporate the strategy into their regular classroom practice. Although there is a definite progression throughout the chapters, I have made each chapter as self-contained as possible.

In all, these five chapters describe over seventy practical techniques for classroom formative assessment. Most of these techniques are not new. What is new is the framework for formative assessment presented in chapter 2, which shows how these disparate techniques fit together, and the research evidence that shows that these techniques are powerful ways to increase student engagement and help teachers become more responsive to their students’ needs.

As I have encountered many hundreds of teachers over the course of my career investigating formative assessment, I have not been able to recall the specific names of teachers and the dates on which I observed their classrooms in every instance in this book. Additionally, other observations occurred as part of research studies in which we granted the teachers anonymity for their contributions. As a result, many of the examples and techniques throughout this book are not cited directly, but rather presented through the lens of my personal observations.

In preparing this second edition, I show how the strategies and techniques presented in this book are just as relevant in colleges and universities as they are in K–12 settings. While the five strategies are equally applicable to college-aged students (and, indeed, to adult learning), the ways in which they are implemented do need to be adapted, and in this second edition, I provide a number of examples of practical techniques for doing formative assessment in higher education, and especially in lecture settings.

Additionally in this second edition, I have obviously updated many of the research studies, particularly those related to the changing nature of the working environment. I have also updated the research evidence on the various ideas that have been proposed for improving schools—and while the evidence has changed, the conclusions have not. First, this updated evidence continues to indicate that most current methods of school improvement won’t help improve schools much. Second, it indicates that the power of classroom formative assessment to improve students’ learning is incredibly strong, with evidence from all over the world showing that not only does classroom formative assessment work, but it is manageable in ordinary classrooms, without extra resources. I hope that this book convinces every reader about the impact that formative assessment can have on student achievement and provides some guidance about how best to begin the difficult, challenging, but worthwhile task of applying research to practice.