‘How does your teacher help you to make your work better?’ Children's understanding of formative assessment

ABSTRACT

This paper on children's perceptions of formative assessment summarizes one important part of the research carried out by our project on teacher feedback which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council¹ over the two years 1994‐5. Our major research questions were:

• What sort of feedback do teachers give children?

• How do children interpret, understand and act on this feedback?

The research involved both teachers and children directly in discussion of feedback and assessment through interviews. Observations and recording in classrooms were also carried out. The findings have shown that the role of feedback is central in learning, and that systematic study in this area can make an important contribution to the conceptual framework of the relationship between teaching, assessment and learning. Our discussions with children provided us with a range of insights into how they perceived feedback, what they felt about it and how they used it. The typology itself is presented in full in Tunstall and Gipps (1996). In this paper, we concentrate on what formative assessment means to young children.

KEYWORDS:

• formative assessment
• Key Stage 1
• educational policy
• National Curriculum