Formative Assessment: What Evidence Do Teachers Find Most Useful?

         In this AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice article, Thomas Guskey (University of Kentucky) and Laura Link (University of North Dakota) say the big idea of mastery learning is usually seen as using low-stakes interim assessments to give students feedback on what they’ve learned well (at an 80% level) and help them focus on errors and misconceptions. Teachers follow up with “corrective” activities aimed at improving students’ performance on a second, parallel assessment with slightly different problems or questions. These follow-up assessments give students a second chance to show mastery (which motivates their efforts) and provide teachers with feedback on how well their supplementary instruction worked. 

         “The ‘just-in-time’ correction,” say Guskey and Link, “prevents minor learning difficulties from accumulating and becoming major learning problems. It also gives teachers a practical means to vary and differentiate their instruction in order to better meet students’ individual learning needs.” (Students who show mastery on the initial assessment take on enrichment or extension activities such as projects, reports, digital academic games, or engaging problem-solving.) 

         “An equally important but often neglected use of formative assessments,” say Guskey and Link, “is the feedback they offer teachers.” The mistakes students make reflect directly on the instruction teachers just conducted. This article reports on a study of K-12 teachers in a suburban midwestern district who were implementing mastery learning. Teachers were asked which of three kinds of assessment reports was most helpful in improving their own teaching (click the article link below and go to pages 14 and 15 for graphics of each type): 

• An item-by-item error analysis of a formative assessment, with special attention to items that 1/3 or more of the class got wrong; 
• Mastery charts of class progress on initial and follow-up formative assessments across multiple units; 
• Summative assessments comparing current students with previous years’ classes taught the same content without mastery learning. 

With the first data report, teachers could zero in on items that more than 1/3 of students got wrong, asking whether it was a poorly-worded test item or instructional practices that failed to reach a significant number of students. With the second data report (mastery charts), teachers could look for a jump in student mastery from the first to the second formative assessment, with students’ scores on initial assessments steadily improving. With the third data report (comparing summative scores), assessments allowed teachers to see if the mastery learning approach was getting better results than the way they had taught the previous year. 

         Guskey and Link solicited teachers’ opinions on the three types of data presentation in a survey asking: 

• Were the results surprising or pretty much what you expected? 
• How informative were the data in providing insights on your teaching? 
• How useful were the results in planning how to teach more effectively? 

There were also open-ended questions asking teachers for their suggestions on adaptations they would recommend and what other types of information would be helpful for improving instruction. 

        What did teachers say? Across grade levels, teachers said they found the item analysis of formative assessments the most useful for improving instruction. “With these data,” comment Guskey and Link, “teachers could determine precisely which concepts and skills had been taught and learned well, and which required a different approach.” The second and third data reports looked at students’ performance at a more general level, which was interesting feedback on how the mastery learning process was working but not as important to improving teaching in real time. Elementary teachers seemed to be better at predicting how well their students would do on formative assessments – probably because teachers in self-contained classes knew their students better than departmentalized middle- and high-school teachers. 

        In the open-response questions, teachers shared two additional insights that are important to schools implementing mastery learning: 

         • Teachers said they needed more time for team meetings to develop common assessments with grade-level colleagues – both to improve the quality of assessment questions and to tap their colleagues’ ideas on crafting better corrective activities.  

        • Teachers said their principals needed to play a more active role in getting teachers to routinely establish mastery-level criteria for formative assessments and more consistently implement mastery learning across the school. 

 “Feedback for Teachers: What Evidence Do Teachers Find Most Useful?” by Thomas Guskey and Laura Link in AASA Journal of Scholarship and Practice, Winter 2022 (Vol. 18, #4, pp. 9-20); the authors can be reached at guskey@uky.edu and laura.link@UND.edu.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #925 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.