School Formative Feedback Systems

Abstract

Data-driven instructional improvement relies on developing coherent systems that allow school staff to generate, interpret, and act upon quality formative information on students and school programs. This article offers a formative feedback system model that captures how school leaders and teachers structure artifacts and practices to create formative information flows across interventions, assessments, and actuation spaces. A formative feedback system model describes the organizational capacity upon which innovations such as comprehensive school reforms, benchmark assessment systems, and student behavior management systems draw to improve teaching and learning in schools.

The research reported in this article was supported by the National Science Foundation (Award 0347030) and by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER), School of Education, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Any opinions, findings, or conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies, WCER, or cooperating institutions. The author acknowledges the research and editorial contributions of Reid Prichett, Chris Thomas, Jeff Grigg, Jeff Watson, Erica Halverson, and Lauren Resnick.

Notes

DiBELS, or Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, are a set of standardized, individually administered measures of early literacy development. They are designed to be short (1 min) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of prereading and early reading skills (http://dibels.uoregon.edu/).

Six Traits of Writing is a comprehensive intervention developed by the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory that organizes the writing process in terms of ideas, organization, voice, sentence fluency, and word choice (http://www.nwrel.org/assessment/department.php?d=1).