Optimizing Formative Assessment

Happy New Year!

I hope that your new year and academic term is beginning well. This week I would like to share a recent article adding to an on-going series of the importance of formative assessment and feedback. The 2023 article entitled, “Optimizing Academic Achievement through Comprehensive Integration of Formative Assessment into Teaching” by Hidayat and Irdiyansyah. shares additional methods to capture student progress.

“This research aims to optimize student academic achievement through a learning process that integrates comprehensive formative assessments, including formative tests, self-assessment, peer assessment, and the initiator of creating summaries or concept maps that are given to students in a structured manner at the end of every lesson. The research method used was a quasi-experimental method with a 2x2 factorial design. Students enrolled in the biology education program of the basic physics course for the 1st semester of the 2019 academic year participated in this study. This study concluded that a learning process that includes comprehensive formative assessment significantly affects students' academic achievement.”

Key support from the literature on this topic includes how formative assessments comprehensively define the role of assessment as part of pedagogy (Black & Wiliam, 2018); Feedback from comprehensive formative assessments can promote student engagement in learning (Zhang & Hyland, 2018) and make adjustments that guide learning and improve achievement (Andrade, 2019); and studies advocate using comprehensive assessments as opportunities to reinforce and enhance learning (Andersson & Palm, 2017; Andrade, 2019; Correia & Harrison, 2020; Csapó & Molnár, 2019; Kulasegaram & Rangachari, 2018).

Ultimately, the researchers suggest that we integrate a comprehensive formative assessment that includes the use of authentic assessment, self-assessment, peer assessment, and assignment to make a summary or concept map of the instructional material learned. Please feel free to access our list of 289 Active Teaching and Formative Assessment Strategies for additional formative assessment ideas.

References

Hidayat, N., & Irdiyansyah, I. (2023). Optimizing academic achievement through comprehensive integration of formative assessment into teaching. European Journal of Educational Research, 12(1), 71-85. https://doi.org/10.12973/eujer.12.1.71