« Back to Document View Databases selected: Multiple databases... Formative assessment: Revisiting the territory D Royce Sadler. Assessment in Education. Abingdon: Mar 1998.Vol. 5, Iss. 1; pg. 77, 8 pgs Subjects: Educational evaluation, Learning, Educators Author(s): D Royce Sadler Document types: Commentary Publication title: Assessment in Education. Abingdon: Mar 1998. Vol. 5, Iss. 1; pg. 77, 8 pgs Source type: Periodical ISSN/ISBN: 0969594X ProQuest document ID: 30132759 Text Word Count 4064 Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?did=30132759&sid=1&Fmt=3&cli entId=15814&RQT=309&VName=PQD Abstract (Document Summary) In response to Black and Wiliam's review article concerning formative assessment, Sadler comments on several themes that recur throughout their paper including the essential and necessary role of the teacher as a mediator and the ecological validity of assessment. Full Text (4064 words) Copyright Carfax Publishing Company Mar 1998 The review article by Black & Wiliam (1998, this issue) draws together research carried out since 1988 on the effectiveness of what is increasingly being termed formative assessment. This refers to assessment that is specifically intended to provide feedback on performance to improve and accelerate learning. The authors have a particular interest in empirical studies that are ecologically valid. Such studies reflect as closely as possible real teaching situations rather than being experiments based on special interventions that test a narrow element of a learning theory. Their welcome review paper covers research spanning all sectors of education from kindergarten through university, and follows two earlier reviews by Natriello (1987) and Crooks (1988). The focus on formative assessment necessarily meant that teacher-made assessments and self and peer assessment provided the principal criterion for selection of the studies reviewed. Black and Wiliam found that, by and large, formative assessment is effective in virtually all educational settings: content areas, knowledge and skill types, and levels of education. The research also indicated that grades and marks do not deliver as much formative effectiveness as tailored comments, and in some situations can be counterproductive, particularly with learners of lower ability. What also emerged, however, was that the quality of feedback is a crucial issue. Not only is it of fundamental importance in understanding the role of formative assessment in improving learning, it is also often inadequately conceptualised and documented in research studies. Rigour in investigative design and analysis amounts to little if the nature of the treatment is poorly described. Hence directions for future development include both further analytic work and comprehensive empirical research. One of the difficulties with experiments and quasi-experiments on the effectiveness of feedback on student learning is that the results may be delayed or masked by other factors. In particular, temporal conditioning of the students, that is, the long- term exposure of students to defective patterns of formative assessment and the socialisation of students into having to accept a wide variety of practices and teacher dispositions (many of which may appear incoherent or inconsistent), promote accommodating survival habits among students. To the extent that these are learned and embedded coping responses, they will take ingenuity, patience and time on the part of educators to reverse. Substantial modification to the learning environment through changes to regular classroom practice involves turning the learning culture around. Transformations made within one part of the curriculum (for example, feedback enhancement in one subject area with a particular teacher) may not be accompanied by complementary, mutually reinforcing teacher behaviours in other parts of the environment where other teachers follow a low feedback route. Any movement towards feedback-enhanced learning conditions (and investigations into their effectiveness, especially those based on experiments and quasi-experiments) must be carried out for long enough for the new procedures to be viewed by learners as normal and natural. Students should also be trained in how to interpret feedback, how to make connections between the feedback and the characteristics of the work they produce, and how they can improve their work in the future. It cannot simply be assumed 5/17/2006 Page 1 of 5