In this study I will critically analyse how formative assessment may have an impact on pupils’ progress in early reading. The first part aims to expound my knowledge and understanding of the perplexing term ‘formative assessment’ and its affinity to other assessment practices, theories and concepts such as ‘Assessment for Learning’ (AFL). The second part will investigate different leaning theories and in particular how formative assessment is most compatible, but not solely, with both constructivist and social-constructivist theories of how children learn. …show more content…
So what is formative assessment? A broad term is that it is the day to day assessments teachers use to inform and modify their teaching and learning activities in way that they are engaging and supporting the pupils more effectively. I am going to look more in depth into this term to understand why it is so widely used within schools. My first understanding of formative assessment was that it is a wide variety of methods that teachers use to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or …show more content…
It's about using information to adapt to your teaching and adapt the work of the students to put the learning back on track - if you like, to make sure that the learning is proceeding in the right direction and to support that learning. Dylan Wiliam (2007)
Looking deeper into this concept I found that formative assessment was much more than this. As teachers we use formative assessment every day and a lot of the time we don’t realise we are using a form of assessment. Formative assessment is sometimes referred to as ‘assessment for learning’, it is an umbrella term for many other types of assessment such as: Observations; Peer assessment; self-assessment; self-evaluation; Marking and feedback; Effective Questioning; think-pair-share; formative use of summative assessment
What formative assessment does is it encourages teachers to take constant readings about where students are just in the same way that pilots takes constant readings about their position. If the learning isn’t proceeding as you had planned then you make adjustments - that is the essence to weighing formative assessment.