Formative assessment: Simply, no additives

Roskos, Kathleen, & Neuman, Susan B. (2012). Formative assessment: Simply, no additives. The Reading Teacher, 65 (8), 634-638.


This is, in essence, a concise primer of formative assessment. I found it helpful as far as it went, but for me it did not go far enough. It was useful to have a clear definition of formative assessment, along with a clear description of how formative assessment works and how it functions within the entire teaching-learning process. I liked how the authors stressed repeatedly that the purpose of formative assessment is to increase student learning—indeed, to raise the quality of student responses. In fact, the whole notion of a rigorous approach to the assessment of students’ literacy learning appealed to me. Setting clear goals, in fact, “hard goals” (p. 536) that students take responsibility for, seems like a good thing. Making criteria for success clear and explicit makes sense within such an approach. There was nothing that the authors had to say here that I disagreed with.

The problem was that the article ended without providing any very specific ideas for actual assessment strategies in the classroom. The few strategies that were discussed were not discussed specifically, and examples were not provided. For example, retelling was mentioned as one way to assess reading comprehension, and the authors suggested that teachers create rubrics to explain success criteria to children. That is all well and good, but teachers need to see some examples of such rubrics, and stories of how they were developed and tested in classrooms. We are not even sent to references for those kinds of examples. The only suggestion of where to go for help in making rubrics and other formative assessment tools was at the end, where the authors suggested readers go to the IRA Engage blog and share with other teachers. It’s not that going to the blog wouldn’t be a good idea, but I’d have liked to see something more concrete here as well. I know there are length limitations on articles in journals, especially in practitioner journals like this one, but some real examples could have taken the place of some of the discussion here, even though that discussion was mostly good.

This article is worth looking at to build a basic conception of formative assessment, but if you really want to learn to do formative assessment in your classroom, you are going to need to look beyond what is provided here.