Is Formative Assessment Losing Its Meaning?

By Stephen Chappuis

Sometimes the vocabulary we use as educators starts out with one meaning, but morphs over time into something entirely different. We speak, for example, of wanting a curriculum that is aligned , intending that our district and classroom content will be matched to state standards. This alignment would further mean that there would be congruence among the written, taught, and learned curriculum. Enter textbooks, supplemental materials, and software programs, now presented to schools with the promise that publishers’ series or products are aligned to states’ standards. The term “aligned” here becomes relative: In some cases, the correlation is tight and specific; in others, it may be loose to vague. Whatever the level of alignment, it now seems that everything purports to be aligned to everything else, and the term itself begins to lose value, if not meaning.

Standards-based reform started out being about all students’ learning well, about pre-identified content and performance standards, and about student attainment of standards—not seat time. Today, in a form that some argue is greatly debased, it is just as recognizable as what Lorrie Shepard, the dean of the school of education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has described as a “heavy-handed system of rewards and punishments.”

Currently being reshaped in today’s No Child Left Behind environment is the term formative assessment . It now is at risk of being understood merely as testing that is done often. In some extremes, it is little more than frequent summative assessment: testing that doesn’t originate in the classroom, that creates another mark for the grade book or a set of data to be analyzed, and that, in theory, tracks individual and/or group progress toward the ultimate summative test—the high-stakes test that quantifies the...