David Ross: Is Homework a Formative Assessment?
By David Ross
A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting conversation with two of my friends, the co-founders of Braide.ai, about homework.
Neither of them are educators, which is probably why they ask such good questions about education. Teachers take for granted the meaning and purpose of standard elements in the learning process. Scott, one of the aforementioned friends, asked me for help editing a description of what Braide does. He had written a passage for marketing collateral in which he claimed that teachers always used homework as a formative assessment. I told him, in far more colorful language, to slow his roll.
Later that day, during a long walk around the Bay Area town where I live, I began to ponder that statement. Do teachers actually use homework as a formative assessment? I decided to learn more by asking Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and Mistral, my new favorite, to answer that question.
What AI Thinks
I asked these five large-language models (LLMs) to respond to the following prompt: “Is homework used for formative assessment?” I took all their responses and compiled them into a narrative, which I then fed to ChatGPT with the following prompt: “I asked several LLMs the following question: Is homework used as a formative assessment? This prompt includes all their responses. Please synthesize the major points of agreement.”
ChatGPT identified five commonalities:
Purpose and Benefits of Homework as Formative Assessment: Homework, when used formatively, provides practice and application opportunities, allowing students to engage with and apply what they’ve learned. This helps teachers gauge student understanding, identify misconceptions, and monitor progress.
Characteristics of Effective Formative Homework: Homework is most effective as formative assessment when it is low-stakes, focused on learning rather than grading, and includes timely, specific feedback. This encourages students to learn from their mistakes and supports their engagement and motivation.
Feedback and Instructional Adjustment: Effective formative homework involves a feedback loop where teachers review assignments, provide constructive feedback, and adjust their instruction based on the insights gained. This feedback helps students understand areas for improvement and guides teachers in refining their approach.
Student Self-Assessment and Reflection: Homework can encourage students to self-assess and reflect on their understanding, supporting skills such as self-awareness and goal-setting.
Considerations for Implementation: To maximize homework's formative value, it should be meaningful, manageable, and aligned with learning objectives. Clear instructions, success criteria, and opportunities for diverse types of tasks enhance its effectiveness.
What Others Think
Those of you who have read my articles for Getting Smart or the New Tech High School Center for Excellence blog may have come to the conclusion that all my thought partners are silicon-based lifeforms. Not true. Accordingly, I turned to other humans to get their opinion on the use of homework for formative purposes.
Grant Wiggins, a longtime colleague when I was Senior Director at the Buck Institute for Education (now PBLWorks), wrote a piece called “Using Homework as a Formative Assessment.” Wiggins, hot under the collar about an ongoing debate in the field, responded with this pungent thought:
“It is completely bogus to declare that ‘homework’ and quizzes are ‘formative’ simply because they are different from quizzes and because they occur throughout the year. If the specific demand only occurs once and you can’t use the feedback from them to do better next time, i.e. if the homework and journals are unique one-time events, then that individual homework assignment is summative. Just because it is not at the end of the year or semester doesn’t make it formative. It’s only formative if it recurs as a task in which I can learn from feedback to improve at the ‘same’ task.”
Wiggins summarized his ideas in a sentence: “What matters - what makes a formative assessment formative - is whether I have a chance to get and use feedback in a later version of the same performance.”
If we refer to the homework design principles I described earlier in this blog we see that two of them align with Wiggins: 1) It has to be focused on learning - not a final product; 2) It has to be accompanied by timely, actionable feedback.
Katy Dyer, writing for NWEA, created guidelines that describe the features of formative assessment, stating that if homework is to be used as a formative assessment it can’t be graded. She does not equivocate on this point even if others writing on the topic stretch the point to include “low-stakes” accountability.
The Yale Porvu Center for Teaching and Learning has created a table that delineates the differences between formative and summative assessments, clearly placing homework in the domain of formative assessment. The domain of formative assessments, according to Porvu, includes the following: In-class discussions, low-stakes group work, weekly quizzes, reflections, exit tickets, and surveys.
“Homework: A Few Practice Arrows,” which appeared on the ASCD blog, is one of my favorite pieces on the topic. The article, written by Susan Christopher, who at the time was a middle school Spanish teacher in Missouri, offers an analogy that clearly communicates the formative nature of homework. She tells parents that homework can be likened to a musician’s rehearsal or an athlete’s practice before a big game. In music or sports, practice and rehearsal frees the performer from fear of mistakes. Mistakes are to be learned from, as is homework.
Final Thoughts
When I taught middle school in Los Angeles I attempted to grade my student’s work (classwork or homework) on a daily basis. I would grade at lunch time, during my prep, immediately after school, and before my wife got home from work. I wanted to provide my students with timely feedback and check their understanding in case I needed to reteach. I also wanted to have enough quality time to enjoy my home life, which included two young sons. That is a heavy lift when you have more than 100 student contacts who generate hundreds of work products each day. Designing homework and classwork as formative assessments can lighten that load.
I’m obviously in favor of any process or tool that gives teachers more quality time and still meets their obligation to give learners timely, actionable feedback the students can use to improve their skills and knowledge. One of the most promising features of AI assessment systems, like Braide, is the ability to serve the needs of both learners and the teachers who devote their lives to guiding them.
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David Ross is the retired CEO of the Partnership for 21st Century Learning. As the former Senior Director of PBLWorks he co-authored The PBL Starter Kit. David has been focusing his current work on the nexus of generative AI and its role in designing, teaching, and assessing Project Based Learning.
You can follow him on X: @davidPBLross
