Designing Formative Assessment That Improves Teaching and Learning: What Can Be Learned from the Design Stories of Experienced Teachers?

This article reports on findings of a qualitative study that investigated the difficulties teachers encounter while designing formative assessment plans and the strategies experienced teachers use to avoid those pitfalls. The pitfalls were identified through an analysis of formative assessment plans that searched for potential threats to alignment, decision-driven data collection, and room for adjustment and improvement. The main pitfalls in the design process occurred when teachers did not explicitly and coherently link all elements of their formative assessment plan or when they did not plan to effectively use information about student learning to improve teaching and learning. Through interviews with experienced teachers, we identified seven design strategies they used to design formative assessment plans that were aligned, consisted of decision-driven data collection, and left room for adjustment and improvement. However, these experienced teachers still encountered difficulties in determining how to formulate the right decisions for decision-driven data collection and how to provide students with enough room for improvement. Lessons learned from the design strategies of these experienced teachers are incorporated in design steps for formative assessment plans all teachers can use.