How to Ensure Curriculum Materials Support Formative Assessment Practices

By Barbara Jones, Cali Kaminsky, and Mariann Lemke

Why Is Formative Assessment Needed?

Although the height of the pandemic has passed, many students are still struggling to catch up to grade-level standards (e.g., as reported in the Education Recovery Scorecard; National Center for Education Statistics).

To support these students, teachers must have effective methods to monitor student understanding on an ongoing basis and adjust to their needs. In short, they need to know about and use an inquiry process consisting of coordinated formative assessment practices. Studies have shown that utilizing formative assessment practices is an effective way to accelerate student learning.

Curriculum materials can facilitate the use of formative assessment practices. Calls for the use of high-quality instructional materials continue to be made around the country, but they often focus on how well materials align to standards that represent what students should know and be able to do.

In this blog, we provide a framework to evaluate how well formative assessment practices are integrated into curriculum materials and offer an example of how to apply this framework to a real set of curriculum materials.

What Are Formative Assessment Practices?

According to the Formative Assessment for Students and Teachers (FAST) state collaborative (please see Notes and Resources for details), formative assessment is: “…a planned, ongoing process used by all students and teachers during learning and teaching to elicit and use evidence of student learning to improve student understanding of intended disciplinary learning outcomes and support students to become self-directed learners.” (FAST SCASS CCSSO, 2018, p.2)

In this definition, formative assessment is not just a test or something teachers do at the end of instruction. Rather, it is an ongoing process that benefits teaching and learning. Both teachers and students collect and use information to keep learning moving forward—lesson by lesson and day by day. Teachers do this through lesson planning, attending to evidence of learning during lessons, providing feedback, and adjusting instructional moves. Students do this by engaging in self-assessment and peer feedback and participating in classroom discourse. Figure 1 provides a list of practices that align with the definition.

Many published curricula do include some types of formative assessment activities such as end-of- lesson exit tickets, Friday quizzes, and thumbs up or down activities.

But these individual types of activities tend not to go far enough to significantly improve student learning. Teachers also need materials that provide a coherent and holistic approach that connects formative assessment practices within and across lessons.

Teachers with high levels of disciplinary and assessment knowledge can and often do modify curriculum-provided lesson plans and activities to include the full process of formative assessment. But having formative assessment practices deeply incorporated into curricular materials can better aid all teachers and students.

What Educators Should Look For in Curricular Materials: A Framework

Curriculum materials may include teachers’ guides, lesson plans, student materials, unit overviews, supports for families, differentiation strategies, assessment recommendations, and much more.

Table 1 provides a framework of “Look-Fors” based on the practices shown in Figure 1 that can be applied to evaluating curricular materials. Using this framework, leaders who are selecting a curriculum can look for alignment to the formative assessment process and consider the degree to which the curricular materials offer resources, tools, and guidance on formative assessment practices to help teachers and students coherently and effectively engage in an ongoing process of inquiry and reflection.

Table 1. Framework for Evaluating Curricular Materials for Formative Assessment Practices

Look-Fors	How This Look-For Might Be Represented in Curricular Materials
Goals that are lesson-sized and focused on learning	Individual lessons include goals, objectives, or targets. Teachers’ guides include unit goals, guiding questions, or themes that teachers can use adopt to make lesson-sized learning goals.
Success criteria or information on what it looks and sounds like when students reach the goal	Criteria appear as “Can Do” statements, “Look-Fors,” “Listen-Fors,” or something similar describing what evidence of learning means.
Rich and authentic tasks that help make student learning visible (and/or audible) to support the collection of evidence	Tasks are rigorous, interactive, culturally relevant, support language, and offer choice of modality so that students are challenged and engaged during learning. Tasks address content learning, disciplinary-specific analytic practices, and language.
Opportunities for students to engage in the formative assessment process directly	Structured opportunities for classroom discourse, peer feedback, and self-assessment are built into lesson plans. Opportunities to assess or self-assess learning are linked to success criteria and provide students with explicit steps and scaffolds (e.g., sentence stems). Guidance is provided for teachers on helping students effectively engage in these practices directly, likely in a teacher’s guide.
Support for teachers’ collection and interpretation of evidence	Materials build on success criteria and provide learning progressions, look- and listen-fors with examples, probing questions to ask students at various stages of a lesson, information on common misconceptions, and/or tips for what to do or say when students demonstrate they are at a certain stage in their learning.
Overall guidance on how to use all the formative assessment practices in a coherent manner	There is guidance for teachers on how to use materials in a comprehensive approach. The guidance makes clearly articulated connections within a lesson between the objectives (learning goals), the success criteria, and the learning activity to support teachers and students to make sense of and act on the evidence produced. There are prompts for teachers and students to ask themselves, “Where am I now?” “Where am I going?” and “How will I get there?” Guidance is provided for school and district leaders to support teachers’ use of curricular materials and the formative assessment process.
Flexibility for teachers and students to respond to evidence of learning	There are opportunities for and examples of how teachers and students can or should pivot during lessons, based on evidence of learning, to support student choice and responsive teaching.

Applying the Framework: An Example

To illustrate how the framework of “look-fors” described above might be applied in evaluating curricular materials, the authors reviewed materials from a commercially available curriculum program – Curriculum Associates i-Ready program. Specifically, the review focused on a grade 4 lesson on place value within a larger math unit on whole numbers and on the lesson’s student text and the related teacher’s guide. Overall, most of the types of “look-fors” that support formative assessment practices were evident in the materials, with some areas for improvement (see Table 2).

Table 2. Applying the Framework

Look-Fors	Evidence of Look-Fors in i-Ready Grade 4 Math Lesson Materials
Goals	The curriculum has both unit themes and lesson objectives that serve to support teachers’ and students’ understanding of learning goals. The learning goals build on one another over time to support understanding the unit’s theme.
Success criteria	Specific success criteria were not identified, making the formative assessment opportunities embedded in the lesson difficult to interpret. The answer keys for some quizzes could be used as a basis to create success criteria, but doing so puts more burden on the teacher.
Rich and authentic tasks	The tasks included in lessons provide opportunities for students to engage in sensemaking, partner work, and reflection through the tasks’ Try It, Discuss It, Connect It structure. The teacher’s guide also states, “Every lesson contains instructional protocols to engage students while affirming and validating their identities.” (Curriculum Associates 2024, p.A17). This type of culturally relevant approach to academic work can support student agency and ownership over learning. There is also information in the teacher’s guide about how to elevate math practices and scaffold tasks for English learners.
Opportunities for students	Self-assessment opportunities for participation appear in the curricular materials as structured “Self-Checks,” “Thumbs Up or Down,” and “Exit Tickets.” “Discuss it” opportunities also encourage reflective discourse, and sentence stems specifically support English learners to engage in this process. The “Give One, Get One” structure embedded in lessons encourages students to exchange ideas, and the “Pass it on” protocol encourages students to hear others’ ideas and build on them. However, the review did not find any structured opportunities in the curricular materials for students to engage in peer feedback on each other’s work. There is some guidance for teachers to support building student capacity to participate in these ways. This guidance is in the pacing guide, which includes instructional routines for modeling (e.g., “Model It”).
Support for teachers’ interpretation of evidence	This element of the framework is present in the “Ask and Listen For” directions in the teacher’s guide. The guide also includes information on prior knowledge that students would typically have gained and future steps to expect in their learning. This information provides insight into a typical progression of learning for students and can help teachers locate where students are in their learning. There are also tips for teachers on common misconceptions that students may have. Student responses to questions, such as those in the Language Routines section of the teacher’s guide, can be used to support gathering and interpreting evidence. One language routine is the “Three Reads” protocol in which students read a word problem three times, each time with a specific focus, asking What is the problem about? then What are we trying to find out? and, lastly, What are the important quantities and relationships? However, without explicit success criteria, the evidence from these routines may still be difficult for teachers and students to make sense of and use to inform next steps.
Overall guidance	Clear information on how to use all the formative assessment features in a coherent formative assessment process was not evident during review, though such information could be provided through professional learning.
Flexibility to respond	Flexibility that teachers and students might apply in responding to evidence was not clear. (Decisions about flexibility may be locally determined.) For example, the materials did not make clear how closely the publisher would recommend that teachers adhere to the pacing guide, given evidence observed during lessons, or how students might make choices about how they would like to demonstrate their learning.

Conclusion

On their own, even the best curriculum materials are unlikely to impact student learning without training on how to effectively use them and leadership support for effective implementation. However, with this support in place, curricular materials that offer routines and strategies for connecting formative assessment practices to an ongoing inquiry cycle can help teachers and students focus their decision-making on evidence of learning.

Research shows that engaging in this kind of reflection on evidence can help advance student learning. For leaders who are tasked with evaluating and selecting a curriculum to adopt, considering the quality of formative assessment integration in the materials they choose for adoption is important, and the indicators explored in this blog offer a place to start.

Learn more about WestEd’s work in formative assessment here.

Notes and Resources

Not all units and lessons or online curriculum components such as videos, assessments, associated games, or family support materials were reviewed. The information included in this review is therefore not exhaustive but rather is intended to provide an example of elements to look for in materials.
FAST is part of the State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards (SCASS) at the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO): https://ccsso.org/formative-assessment-students-and-teachers-
fast-collaborative.

Notes from the Field