David Ross: The 5 Essential Features of Quality Formative Assessment
The four years I spent teaching an American Studies block at New Technology High School in Napa, CA, was the most challenging stretch of my 32 years in education.
Let me clarify that statement. The school was widely considered to be one of the best project-based learning schools in the U.S. It enrolled some of the most independent and uniquely talented students from a four-county area. The teaching staff was one of the most skilled I have ever worked with. So where’s the problem?
Well, I averaged 150 student contacts per day. I taught a combo class of English 11 and 20th Century U.S. History. My students generated reams of written work in the form of analyses, reports, business plans, essays, etc. I spent 10-12 hours every weekend providing summative assessments of this work. I tried to use peer assessment to provide formative assessment, but I felt guilty because I simply did not have the time to provide direct, actionable, and timely feedback to every student who submitted a draft.
Neither I nor my family will ever get those hours back, nor will my students get that personalized formative feedback I so desired to give them. But that was then and this is now. There are a lot of AI-powered assessment platforms on the market, among them Braide. If I were still in the classroom (I retired from that work in June of 2021) I would be among the first to sign up to use them. But I would want to make sure that they followed what I believe to be the essential features of formative feedback.
The list you see here is not something I learned in my teacher preparation program. These essential features were learned in the trenches during my 13 years as a classroom teacher, my five years as an instructional coach, and my 14 years in educational leadership via posts at the Buck Institute for Education (Senior Director) and Partnership for 21st Century Learning (CEO).
Timeliness
Ideally, formative feedback should be provided immediately after a student completes a learning task. Students, um, have short attention spans and live in a world dominated by distractors. Immediate feedback helps reinforce correct answers or correct errors before they can become entrenched.
The apostle of this principal is John Hattie, who is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Melbourne. Hattie told an interviewer for Visible Learning: “... while teachers see feedback as corrections, criticism, comments, and clarifications, for students unless it includes “where to next” information they tend to not use it. Students want feedback just for them, just in time, and just helping nudge forward.”
This, as you know, is a difficult task for any teacher, especially those like me who have/had a large student contact list and must review lengthy submissions. If the tech companies get this right it will become the greatest benefit of the new AI assessment tools.
Specificity
I like to practice what I preach. When students would complete a semester or year-end assessment of me I would preface this activity by giving the following instructions:
“Do not write things like ‘Mr. Ross is great’ or ‘Mr. Ross is the bomb.’ It makes me feel good but doesn’t help me get better. Also, don’t write ‘Mr. Ross sucks’ or ‘Mr. Ross is the worst teacher in the school.’ That doesn’t help me improve either. Be specific. Offer examples.”
Accordingly, feedback should be clear, focused, and specific to the task at hand. Vague or generalized feedback is difficult for learners to use effectively. The same criteria should be true of an AI assessment platform that you choose. It should make specific reference (perhaps even pull out quotes) to the submitted work.
This is an example of the type of feedback I would give my students and I would want an AI to provide: “Your thesis is clear, but your supporting evidence lacks detail — try including more statistics or examples. You tell me that the movement of migrant labor to California permanently changed the state’s politics but you don’t give me details.”
Some of the best advice I’ve read on this element comes from retired music teacher Robert Adams, who used a blog on his teaching style to highlight best practices in formative assessment.
Task-Oriented
I was always worried about injecting my personal feelings about the learner into my assessment practices. On Friday afternoons, prior to my weekend summative assessment marathons, I would ask a teaching assistant to put masking tape over the names of the students on each submission. I didn’t want my sometimes strong feelings (positive or negative) to color my evaluation of their work.
Effective formative feedback focuses on the task or response, not on the learner or their actions. It should evaluate and explain the student's work without personal judgment.
Even though I came from a poor, working class background I found myself holding biased expectations about students who evinced "highbrow" cultural capital. That bias disadvantaged students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. This idea, which I only partially understood while working in the classroom, is lucidly explained in a wonderful study called “Teacher Bias in Assessments by Student Ascribed Status: A Factorial Experiment on Discrimination in Education.”
Constructive Guidance
My first long stint as a classroom teacher occurred in a gritty middle school to the east of downtown Los Angeles. My classes usually featured a mix of a dozen home languages. The majority of the students came from immigrant families, all working poor, with no parents who had attended college. My usual assessment of MUGS (mechanics, usage, grammar, and syntax) produced nothing but a sea of red ink on written assignments.
I began to understand that feedback should not only indicate whether a response is correct or incorrect but also provide explanation, guidance, or additional information to help improve learning. I bought dictionaries for every table group and taught students how to use spell check. I created a half-dozen graphic organizers to assist in the writing process. I created word banks, a library of sentence starters, and a library of writing templates.
Telling students that they had made a mistake would shut down learning until I began providing actionable and relatable resources they could use to improve their work. I’m eager to see how the tech companies operationalize this feature of formative assessment.
Student Involvement
My first experiments with peer feedback didn’t go well. My signal failure related to the fact that I didn’t provide my students with a process and structured mechanisms that allowed them to give timely, actionable, and comprehensible feedback to their peers.
We all know that formative feedback should actively involve students in the learning process, encouraging self-assessment, peer assessment, and goal-setting. To be successful at that task requires a ton of pre-teaching and a focus on process.
In my high school classes I calibrated students on my writing rubrics (narrative, expository, etc.) by having them jigsaw the rubrics and translate them into student-friendly language that was turned into classroom posters. This prepared them to self- and peer-assess using the rubrics. I also trained them to use checklists that focused on writing problems that interfered with understanding. I didn’t want them to redline every spelling mistake; I wanted them to let their writing partner know when the mis-spellings interfered with the reader’s understanding.
I am a big fan of modeling. My students would watch me model how to use the rubric and checklist to “peer” assist a student’s writing. Then I would ask a group of students to model the same process. Then I would video record a second iteration of that process and add it to a library of tutorials I placed in a classroom folder in our LMS.
Final Thoughts
Like most classroom teachers, I have collected a ton of assessment tricks, strategies, and techniques over the years. Even though I have left the classroom I am always looking for more because I spend a lot of my time in the U.S. and China advising teachers to effectively use technology to lighten the burden of assessment. I favor technology that makes the most of these time-tested strategies, some of which are included in this nifty list provided by NWEA.
My advice on formative assessment, whether done by you or by an AI-powered system you subscribe to, is to follow these best practices. AI may be able to lighten your workload if it mimics the behaviors of successful teachers who learned the hard way.
