Digital formative assessment can foster student success

Assessment is often seen both by teachers and students as something cumbersome and separate from the learning process. Teachers may not see how to make assessment an integral and beneficial part of learning, particularly if they are used to ‘teaching to the test’, or feel they lack time to do it and want to move on to other topics in the curriculum. Yet, formative assessment can provide a bridge between learning and assessment, and digital tools can support formative assessment practices.

Why is (digital) formative assessment important for your schools?

Research indicates that digital formative assessment (DFA) has great potential to provide this bridge between learning and assessment and thereby support more powerful student learning, yet currently it is not widespread in schools in Europe. Classroom studies have measured formative assessment in ICT-based environments and found that when effectively used, it may have a significant impact on student achievement (e.g. in English: Bhagat & Spector, 2017; Faber, Luyten & Visscher, 2017; Wall et al. 2006).

"The fundamental equation of formative assessment is that better evidence leads to better decisions leads to better learning"
Dylan Wiliam Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment - UCL Institute of Education, UK

Digital formative assessment provides timely feedback and helps students to become more autonomous learners.

What other benefits does it provide? These short videos from Dylan Wiliam and Assess@Learning partners show what they are.

How can digital tools support formative assessment?

Already in 2011, John Hattie (video in English), University of Melbourne, in his widely cited review of meta-reviews (in English) in education research, found significant positive effect sizes for a range of formative assessment methods in ICT-based environments (e.g. formative evaluation). In the Assess@Learning literature review (in English) (2019) Janet Looney highlights different ways in which digital tools can enhance formative assessment practices. According to research, digital tools can potentially:

 

automate processes and save time for the teacher

 

make the learning process more visible to teachers, students and parents

 

help to better understand students’ learning

 

allow for rapid (real-time) feedback

 

help predict and adapt learning processes

 

facilitate the scaffolding of next steps for learning at an appropriate level of difficulty

What is (digital) formative assessment?

Given these benefits, what exactly is (digital) formative assessment and what do you as a policy maker need to know about it?

“Formative assessment is any assessment that forms the direction of future learning.”
Dylan Wiliam Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment - UCL Institute of Education, UK

In this video, Dylan Wiliam and Assess@Learning project partners explain what (digital) formative assessment learning is. It is only through assessing that we can find out whether what we did as teachers resulted in the understanding that we hoped for in our students, according to Dylan Wiliam. Do you agree, and do you want to know more?

For definitions of terms used here and elsewhere, check out the glossary.

What makes a teaching practice a formative one?

 

Digital formative assessment includes all the features of the digital learning environment that (1) support assessment of student progress and (2) provide feedback to be used to modify the teaching and learning activities in which students are engaged (Looney, 2019; in A@L literature review (in English).

DFA encompasses a broad range of approaches, tools and learning strategies, such as personalised learning platforms, e-portfolios/ digital diaries, social media (blogs, wikis, etc.), digital storytelling, e-textbooks, mobile learning, classroom polling, dashboards and monitoring tools and digital games.

While DFA practices are diverse, what they have in common is that they help the teacher (and learner) decide what to do next. The Assess@Learning definition of DFA highlights that assessment only becomes formative when evidence of learning is actually used by teachers and learners to adapt next steps in the learning process. One example: if a teacher uses the results of a short quiz at the end of the lesson to plan their next lesson; the evidence from the assessment is used formatively.

Formative and summative assessment for student success

Formative assessment can therefore benefit students. Nevertheless, summative assessment (typically graded tests) is still important. Both can go hand in hand to foster student success. Formative assessment can help students prepare for graded, high-stakes, tests. This video shows how.

How can teachers implement DFA efficiently?

As seen in the previous sections, digital formative assessment can significantly enhance student motivation and achievement, but this can only happen if teachers implement such practices efficiently.

This includes how teachers design lessons to support learning aims, elicit evidence of student understanding, respond to identified learning needs and support student reflection. The goal is to help students to develop their own learning aims and gradually become more autonomous. For example, teachers need to develop the right questions to elicit student understanding or possible misconceptions.

For evidence of learning to be used effectively, both teacher and student roles need to change. Teachers need to foster student agency, that is, the students’ ability to take more control over their learning. Crucial to this is how much of the feedback teachers give is actually received and processed by students, according to Hattie (video in English).

Teachers need to know which digital tools best support their pedagogical goals. Surveys and evaluations have found most teachers tend to use new technologies to reinforce traditional approaches to learning and assessment (in English: Langworthy et al, 2010; Selwyn, 2010; Voogt, 2009). They also need to know how to protect student data privacy and deal with ethical considerations related to the use of DFA.

Ethical considerations around digital assessment

More data are used to make decisions – with or without human intervention – on the next steps for student learning. While this opens exciting new possibilities, it also raises ethical questions such as ‘Is every possible scenario desirable?’, ‘Do teachers and parents need to be able to see everything a student has done online and when (e.g. when a student completes homework)?’, and ‘What rules should govern the use of Artificial Intelligence in schools?’

In this video, Eric Welp, advisor at Kennisnet, Netherlands provides useful hints on where to start with supporting your schools to use digital tools in a safe and ethical way. There is more in this Case Study Information security and privacy in Dutch schools.

More advanced use of digital assessment in schools will generate new questions around trust and safety issues, interpretation and usability of data, exchange of data about learning and ownership of data, as well as ethical issues. Questions also arise about the underlying school digital infrastructure, for instance, how to ensure interoperability between different digital tools and services, so that teachers can have an overview of all student data.

For teachers and students to effectively to make use of evidence of learning, they need to be able to use and interpret the data. To that end, data from different educational sources need to be sufficiently clear and comparable. Therefore, exchange of data becomes important, but it can be difficult to aggregate results at the right level. The goal is to create valuable information about learning that can be exchanged and is comparable.

More data are used to make decisions – with or without human intervention – on the next steps for student learning. While this opens exciting new possibilities, it also raises ethical questions such as ‘Is every possible scenario desirable?’, ‘Do teachers and parents need to be able to see everything a student has done online and when (e.g. when a student completes homework)?’, and ‘What rules should govern the use of Artificial Intelligence in schools?’

 

How to foster DFA practices in your schools?

Having seen the potential of DFA for student learning, what it actually is, and how teachers can implement DFA practices efficiently, how can you as a policy maker support schools to innovative their assessment practices? Some concrete ideas and inspiration are set out in the videos and infographic below.

Are you still not entirely sure what digital formative assessment (DFA) is all about? – Then check out this short video before moving on to how you as a policy maker can support your schools.

Which of the ideas on how to foster digital formative assessment practices in your schools do you already practise, or think could be suitable in your context? In the video above, Assess@Learning partners share what they think is important to successfully implement digital formative assessment in schools.

Discover the Assess@Learning toolkit

To share your knowledge on how digital formative assessment can foster student success with other policy makers, invite them to join this toolkit via this link. 

To get in touch with the Assess@Learning project to know more, please contact us at info@eun.org  

Case studies
Policy makers/School heads

Our 15 Case studies illustrate actions taken by policy makers and school heads that enable DFA practices. Browse the Case Studies for inspiration on how best to support schools using DFA practices.

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Teaching scenarios 
Teachers

The teaching scenarios are scenarios from teachers for teachers. Want to know more about concrete practice examples ? Browse through our teaching scenarios.

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Glossary
All

Are terms unclear? Check out the glossary.

See the glossary