A socio‐cultural theorisation of formative assessment

Abstract

Formative assessment has attracted increasing attention from both practitioners and scholars over the last decade. This paper draws on the authors’ empirical research conducted over eleven years in educational situations ranging from infant schools to postgraduate education to propose a theorisation of formative assessment. Formative assessment is seen as taking place when teachers and learners seek to respond to student work, making judgements about what is good learning with a view to improving that learning. However, the theorisation emphasises formative assessment as being a discursive social practice, involving dialectical, sometimes conflictual, processes. These bring into play issues of power in which learners’ and teachers’ identities are implicated and what counts as legitimate knowledge is framed by institutional discourses and summative assessment demands. The paper argues that, rather than only paying attention to the content of learning, an ambition for formative assessment might be to deconstruct these contextual issues, allowing a critical consideration of learning as a wider process of becoming. The article suggests a model that might be useful to teachers and learners in achieving this.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of Harry Torrance towards this work, particularly in its earlier stages. Thanks are also due to Michael Eraut and Judy Sebba for their comments on the draft.

Notes

1. They used the term ‘evaluation’ though current usage, even in the USA, would now prefer assessment.

2. See also Gipps (1999) for a useful review of assessment in general which acknowledges both perspectives.

3. This is the term that is used in most Assessment for Learning materials and research (e.g. Black et al., 2003). Our experience with teachers doing action research as postgraduate students has been that although attracted to this concept, over time they come to see it as leading to rather superficial engagement.

4. The current debate about the way that Assessment for Learning is being implemented in a somewhat simplistic way (see Smith & Gorard, 2005 and Black et al., 2005) rather suggests that a more problematic view of formative assessment may not be a bad thing for developing practice.

5. This is not to say that they are the same thing—rather that they are inevitably implicated by each other.

6. See the point in the next paragraph about ‘invisible pedagogy’. Many examples have been described in schools where framing is ostensibly weak but control remains high (see Torrance & Pryor, 1998, chapter 4; also Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Walkerdine, 1988).