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In their widely read article "Inside the Black Box," Mr. Black and Mr. Wiliam demonstrated that improving formative assessment raises student achievement. Now they and their colleagues report on a follow-up project that has helped teachers change their practice and students change their behavior so that everyone shares responsibility for the students' learning.
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IN 1998 "Inside the Black Box," the predecessor of this article, appeared in this journal.1 Since then we have learned a great deal about the practical steps needed to meet the purpose expressed in the article's subtitle: "raising standards through classroom assessment."
In the first part of "Inside the Black Box," we set out to answer three questions. The first was, Is there evidence that improving formative assessment raises standards? The answer was an unequivocal yes, a conclusion based on a review of evidence published in over 250 articles by researchers from several countries.2 Few initiatives in education have had such a strong body of evidence to support a claim to raise standards.
This positive answer led naturally to the second question: Is there evidence that there is room for improvement? Here again, the available evidence gave a clear and positive answer, presenting a detailed picture that identified three main problems: 1) the assessment methods that teachers use are not effective in promoting good learning, 2) grading practices tend to emphasize competition rather than personal improvement, and 3) assessment feedback often has a negative impact, particularly on low-achieving students, who are led to believe that they lack "ability" and so are not able to learn.
However, for the third question - Is there evidence about how to improve formative assessment? - the answer was less clear. While the evidence provided many ideas for improvement, it lacked the detail that would enable teachers to implement those ideas in their classrooms. We argued that teachers needed "a variety of living examples of implementation."
THE JOURNEY: LEARNING WITH TEACHERS
Since 1998, we have planned and implemented several programs in which groups of teachers in England have been supported in developing innovative practices in their classrooms, drawing on the ideas in the original article. While this effort has amply confirmed the original proposals, it has also...