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Test Industry Split Over 'Formative' Assessment

Testing expert Richard J. Stiggins says he has stopped using the term “formative assessment.”

—Photograph by Hector Emanuel for Education Week

Purpose of Informing Instruction Obscured by Market, Critics Say

There’s a war of sorts going on within the normally staid assessment industry, and it’s a war over the definition of a type of assessment that many educators understand in only the sketchiest fashion.

Formative assessments, also known as “classroom assessments,” are in some ways easier to define by what they are not. They’re not like the long, year-end, state-administered, standardized, No Child Left Behind Act-required exams that testing professionals call “summative.” Nor are they like the shorter, middle-of-the-year assessments referred to as “benchmark” or “interim” assessments.

Or they shouldn’t be, at least according to experts inside and outside the testing industry, who believe that truly “formative” assessments must blend seamlessly...