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ABSTRACT This paper reports on the findings of a 2-year research project into the process of formative assessment in the science classrooms of 10 teachers. Formative assessment is defined as the process used by teachers and students to recognise and respond to student learning in order to enhance that learning, during the learning. The findings indicate that the teachers used two kinds of formative assessment, planned and interactive. Planned formative assessment involved the teachers eliciting and interpreting assessment information and then taking action. It tended to be carried out with the whole class. Interactive formative assessment involved the teachers in noticing, recognising and responding, and tended to be carried out with some individual students or small groups. This paper discusses these two types of formative assessment, how they are related, how they are integral to teaching and learning processes, and how they are dependent on teachers' pedagogical knowledge.
Introduction
One of the purposes of assessment within education is that of informing and improving teaching programmes and students' on-going learning. Assessment intended to enhance teaching and learning is called formative assessment. The New Zealand Ministry of Education (1993) includes formative assessment in its curriculum policy and defines it as:
A range of formal and informal assessment procedures (for example, the monitoring of children's writing development, anecdotal records, and observations) undertaken by teachers in the classroom as an integral part of the normal teaching and learning process in order to modify and enhance learning and understanding. (New Zealand, Ministry of Education, 1994, p. 48)
Within the research reported here, formative assessment was defined as:
the process used by teachers and students to recognise and respond to student learning in order to enhance that learning, during the learning. (Cowie & Bell, 1996, p. 3)
This is similar to other definitions (Gipps, 1994; Black, 1995) in the literature (Bell & Cowie, 1997).
While there has been much written on the importance of formative assessment to improve learning and standards of achievement (Harlen & James, 1996), there has been little research on the process of formative assessment (Black, 1995). This paper reports research funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Education in 1995-96 to investigate classroom-based assessment, which is reported more fully in Bell & Cowie (1997). The main...