Effective Formative Assessment for Elementary Grade Classrooms: A Research Review

• In Event: Current Directions and New Insights in Formative Assessment

Abstract

This paper discusses practical implications of formative assessment effectiveness research in grades one through six. Formative assessment effectiveness is a timely topic for state and district leaders as they develop implementation plans for Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), including their approaches to supporting school-based practitioners (Shepard, Penuel, & Davidson, 2017).
This paper addresses one overarching research question: What effectiveness claims can we responsibly make about formative assessment?
To improve on prior research, we adopted Bennett’s (2011) recommendations for conducting research on the effectiveness of formative assessment, including: precisely defining formative assessment, considering whether studies of the impact of formative assessment were conducted with sufficient quality to support causal inferences, and describing concrete instantiations of effective formative assessment.

Authors

• Mary Maguire Klute, Marzano Research

• Helen S. Apthorp, Marzano Research Laboratory