Formative e-assessment:

some theoretical resources

Dylan Wiliam
www.dylanwiliam.net
Feedback
Components of a feedback system
❚ data on the actual level of some measurable attribute;
❚ data on the reference level of that attribute;
❚ a mechanism for comparing the two levels and generating information
about the ‘gap’ between the two levels;
❚ a mechanism by which the information can be used to alter the gap.

To an engineer, information is therefore feedback only if the information

fed back is actually used in closing the gap.
Formative assessment
Frequent feedback is not necessarily formative

Feedback that causes improvement is not necessarily formative

Assessment is formative only if the information fed back to the learner is

used by the learner in making improvements

To be formative, assessment must include a recipe for future action

No such thing as formative assessment
Descriptions of
❚ Instruments
❚ Purposes
❚ Functions

An assessment functions formatively when evidence about student

achievement elicited by the assessment is interpreted and used to
make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to
be better, or better founded, than the decisions that would have
been made in the absence of that evidence.
Some principles
A commitment to formative assessment
❚ Does not entail any view of what is to be learned
❚ Does not entail any view of what happens when learning takes place
Types of formative assessment
Long-cycle
❚ Span: across units, terms
❚ Length: four weeks to one year
Medium-cycle
❚ Span: within and between teaching units
❚ Length: one to four weeks
Short-cycle
❚ Span: within and between lessons
❚ Length:
❙ day-by-day: 24 to 48 hours
❙ minute-by-minute: 5 seconds to 2 hours
Unpacking formative assessment
Key processes
❚ Establishing where the learners are in their learning
❚ Establishing where they are going
❚ Working out how to get there

Participants
❚ Teachers
❚ Peers
❚ Learners
 Aspects of formative assessment
Where the
Where the learner is How to get there
learner is going
Engineering
effective
Clarify and Providing feedback
discussions, tasks
Teacher share learning that moves
and activities that
intentions learners forward
elicit evidence of
learning
Understand and
Activating students as learning
Peer share learning
resources for one another
intentions

Understand
Activating students as owners
Learner learning
of their own learning
intentions
Five “key strategies”…
Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
❚ curriculum philosophy (goals and horizons)
Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit
evidence of learning
❚ classroom discourse, interactive whole-class teaching
Providing feedback that moves learners forward
❚ feedback
Activating students as learning resources for one another
❚ collaborative learning, reciprocal teaching, peer-assessment
Activating students as owners of their own learning
❚ metacognition, motivation, interest, attribution, self-assessment

(Wiliam & Thompson, 2007)

…and one big idea
Use evidence about learning to adapt teaching and learning to meet
student needs
Gresham’s law and assessment
Usually (incorrectly) stated as “Bad money drives out good”

“The essential condition for Gresham's Law to operate is that there must
be two (or more) kinds of money which are of equivalent value for some
purposes and of different value for others” (Mundell, 1998)

The parallel for assessment: Summative drives out formative

Perhaps the most that summative assessment (more properly,

assessment designed to serve a summative function) can do is keep out
of the way
Signature pedagogies…
…in Law
…in Medicine
Changing demands for skill
Which of the following categories of skill has disappeared from the
work-place most over the last forty years?
y Routine manual
y Non-routine manual
y Routine cognitive
y Complex communication
y Expert thinking/problem-solving
Autor, Levy & Murnane,
The regulation of learning
Signature pedagogies
❚ Pedagogies of engagement
❚ Pedagogies of contingency
❙ Proactive
❙ Interactive
❙ Retroactive