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Formative assessment is an essential part of high-quality practice for early childhood educators (IOM & NRC 2015). But what exactly does formative assessment mean, and what does it look like in early childhood practice? This question is harder to answer than it seems because there are many different types of formative assessment. Let's start with a general definition of assessment.
In the broadest terms, developmentally appropriate assessment produces information that illuminates what children "know and are able to do" (NRC 2008, 327). The National Research Council's 2008 report on early childhood assessment describes the formative purpose of assessment as tracking the progress of individual children toward learning objectives and using the information to inform curricular and instructional planning (NRC 2008). Similarly, a more recent definition says formative assessment is "a process teachers use to monitor and provide feedback on children's learning and to adjust their own instruction to better meet children's needs" (Bodrova & Leong 2018, 18). To be as useful and meaningful as possible for teachers, formative assessment in early education should have "a fixed plan and structure," and yet be "individualized, flexible to meet the context, and comprehensive" (Riley-Ayers 2018, 2). Ideally, formative assessment constitutes a key part of an ongoing instructional cycle aimed at understanding children's current and next levels of learning (IOM & NRC 2015).
Because they give educators a research-based lens through which to understand children's current and next levels of knowledge and skills, learning progressions (sometimes called learning trajectories to emphasize the goal they are moving toward) are a central feature of high-quality formative assessment (IOM & NRC 2015). Progressions define sequences of learning and development from less complex to more complex and from less challenging to more challenging. Well-defined, research-based progressions incorporating data gathered on thousands of children help teachers deepen their understanding of the development and learning of the children they teach. Such an approach to assessment provides essential information about how individual children are gaining skills and knowledge, so learning progressions are critical to making formative assessment useful. Formative assessments grounded in learning progressions enhance teachers' abilities to identify what each child currently knows and to design educational activities that support children in moving to the next level of learning and development. This is especially powerful...