The paradigm shift from summative to formative assessment can be traced to the 1970s when researchers began to question the effectiveness of the traditional focus of classroom assessment on the summative activities of measuring, grading and evaluating students’ performances to external standards (Black and Wiliam, 1998a). Such assessment is typically aligned with behaviourist understandings of teaching and learning. The theory of behaviourism focuses on overt behaviours that can be measured (Good and Brophy, 1978), underpinned by a view of the mind as responding to observable stimulus, thus ignoring the capability of thought processing occurring internally (Skinner, 1968). Within behaviourism, students are viewed as
The concept of formative assessment first appeared in the late 1960s (Scriven, 1967), but it took time for this concept to be adopted by educational researchers. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, researchers and educators shifted their focus towards emphasising the role of assessment in enhancing learning (Assessment Reform Group, 1999; Black and Wiliam, 1998a). This shifting trend in research reflected and affected the roles of teachers and learners in the assessment process; to a certain extent, it redefined assessment. As literature in the field of assessment suggests, the assessment process in education has changed dramatically since 1967: from the learner being dependent on the teacher to the learner being able (and encouraged) to form a partnership in learning with their teacher (Sadler, 1989).
Bloom et al. (1971) were the first to apply formative assessment to the context of student learning (Bennett, 2011) and mastery learning (Frey and Schmitt, 2007). It is important to note that since the work of Bloom et al. (1971), scholarly discourse has continued to use formative assessment in relation to student learning in the classroom rather than the outcome of an educational programme (Black and Wiliam, 2003). In their definition, Bloom et al. (1971) wrote of the benefits of formative assessment for students, teachers and curriculum makers;
Formative evaluation is the use of systematic evaluation in the process of curriculum construction, teaching, and learning for the purpose of improving any of these three processes. Since formative evaluation takes place during the formation stage, every effort should be made to use it to improve the process (p. 117).
Their definition provided three characteristics that distinguish between formative and summative assessment, which are: (i) purpose (formative assessment supports the learner while summative assessment is for certification and grading), (ii) timing (formative assessment occurs more frequently while summative assessment tends to take place at the end of teaching and learning), and (iii) level of generalisation (formative assessment targets specific aspects of proficiency while summative tests assess broad areas of learning) (Newton, 2007).
In the 1980s, Royce Sadler further developed the concept and proposed a model of formative assessment (Shepard, 2006). He advanced feedback as a key feature in formative assessment. However, feedback is only effective if the person or persons receiving it are able to make changes or take appropriate actions (Sadler, 1989). According to Sadler (1989), feedback in the classroom serves two audiences: teachers utilise feedback to make curricular and instructional decisions, while
students apply it to act on their strengths and weaknesses. He claims that the difference between formative and summative assessment lies in the “purpose and effect,” and not the “timing” (p. 120). Formative assessment plays a role in shaping and improving student performance as compared to summative assessment, which is a collection of examples of a student’s achievement status (Sadler, 1989).
The current popularity of and focus on formative assessment is largely due to the work of Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (1998a). They emphasised that formative assessment, although not widely or successfully practised at the time, was not a new concept. In their review, Black and Wiliam (1998a, p. 7-8) define formative assessment as encompassing “all those activities undertaken by teachers, and/or their students, which provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged.” This definition indicates that formative assessment involves two actions, which are: learners must be aware of a gap between their current level of competence and the desired goal and they must take action to close that gap. The idea of helping students to move from their current learning status to the desired learning goal resonates with ZPD (Vygotsky, 1978) (see Section 2.2.3) and is consistent with the purposes and strategies of feedback that enhances learning (Hattie and Timperley, 2007; Sadler, 1989). Black and Wiliam’s (1998a) definition highlights feedback as central to formative assessment and emphasizes its transformational function in relation to teaching and learning. Although this definition does not describe when formative assessment occurs and what kind of activities are conducted as formative assessment, it provides the foundation for a variety of subsequent interpretations of the term. Since teachers could also use information from summative assessment to adapt instruction (Thompson and Wiliam, 2008), the use of assessment information was insufficient to differentiate formative assessment from summative assessment. Since formative assessment is integral to teaching and learning, the “big idea” behind formative assessment is that “pupils and teachers use evidence of learning to adapt teaching and learning to meet immediate learning needs minute-to-minute and day-to-day” (Thompson and Wiliam, 2008, p. 6). This revised definition integrates formative assessment closely with classroom activities and provides the clarion call for teachers to closely plan the use of formative assessment within their teaching activities. In an effort to distil further the definition, Black and Wiliam (2009) re-stated formative assessment as classroom practices in which;
Practice in a classroom is formative to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited (Black and Wiliam 2009, p. 10)
This definition is significant because it advances the student’s role in learning, since learners also make decisions about the next steps (Shepard, 2000). Interestingly, Black and Wiliam (2009) do not use the term assessment in their definition but replace it with practice. This is a welcome development in publications about formative assessment as it seems to better describe the nature of the form of ‘assessment’.
The identification of the formative function of assessment has meant that teachers previously held understanding of assessment to evaluate and measure learning is no longer considered effective in classrooms. Thus, in essence, many teachers are now caught in a paradigm shift: the current conception of formative assessment and feedback has advocated teaching and learning as facilitative and student-centred, and as part of an interactive learning environment, with an emphasis on learning that takes place at an individual rate (Clarke and Hollingsworth, 2002). This is in contrast to behaviourism, particularly to the centrality of teacher control over the transmission of knowledge (Skinner, 1968). Within this new paradigm, learning, teaching and assessment were conceptualised as an integrative process (Harlen and James, 1997).
Since the introduction of formative assessment, significant attention has been paid to the integrated nature of teaching, learning and assessment (Torrance and Pryor, 1998). Influenced by current thinking on effective learning, the conceptualisation of assessment and its implication for teaching (Black and Wiliam, 1998a; James, 2006), and particularly how assessment informs learning (Black et al., 2004), researchers increasingly discuss assessment as a tool for enhancing learning (rather than only evaluating it). Although the initial notion of assessment was shaped and influenced by behaviourism and constructivism, sociocultural perspectives are now much more prevalent in educational theory (James, 2006).
As has been acknowledged, the paradigm shift is problematic in that both formative and summative assessments have the potential to support learning and both are important in education (Bennett, 2011; Broadfoot, 2007; Harlen, 2005). The dilemma
is that by contrasting formative with summative assessment, the positive aspect of formative assessment becomes idealised (Torrance, 2012). As Torrance (2012) argues, formative assessment, as understood by the Assessment Reform Group (1999), is always presented as a “good thing” for student learning (Torrance, 2012, p.327). Yet, summative assessment can have a formative function, and formative assessment may not always result in positive benefits to student learning. However, Black and Wiliam (1998a) suggest that formative assessment if properly implemented, would significantly impact student learning. Thus, the next section will explore the role of formative assessment processes in supporting learning.