Formative Assessment

“Formative assessment is the process used by teachers and students to notice, recognize, and respond to student learning in order to enhance that learning, during the learning.”

— Beverly Bell & Bronwen Cowie*

The Challenge

WestEd’s Formative Insights Team supports students, teachers, and school leaders to reframe daily instruction in ways that explicitly teach the skills and mindsets necessary to develop learner agency through formative assessment routines.

Formative assessment empowers educators and students to gather evidence of learning. WestEd’s approach focuses on equity and student agency, ensuring every learner feels valued. Our model fosters inclusive environments where students develop positive identities and share responsibility for learning.

What We Do

Formative Insights champions a transformative shift in educational practices. Our approach emphasizes the importance of embedding formative assessment into daily teaching, encouraging educators to view it as an ongoing, intentional process. This shift not only enhances learning outcomes but also nurtures a supportive culture where all educators, staff, and leaders play a vital role in fostering effective formative assessment practices.

Key Outcomes:

Increased attendance
Greater student participation and motivation
Increased collaborative learning with peers
Improved positive learner identities
Greater student agency

By focusing on our guiding principles—learning culture, student identity, formative assessment, and student agency—we promote equity across schools and districts, ensuring that every student has the opportunity to thrive in their educational journey.

Professional Learning Services

WestEd’s Formative Insights team leads transformative professional learning experiences with thousands of educators across the nation. We blend learning with coaching and capacity-building to scale formative assessment practices systemwide.

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Introductory Formative Assessment Institutes

Scaling Teacher Learning

This institute supports teachers and leaders in exploring formative assessment to elicit, interpret, and use evidence to enhance learning and boost student autonomy and motivation.

About Institutes

Formative Assessment for Classroom Teachers (FACT)

Scaling Teacher Learning

This online course provides a wealth of the latest resources that align formative assessment practices with recent research on how students develop foundational skills for learner agency through formative assessment.

About FACT Course

Leading for Agency

Building Leadership Capacity

This experience helps leaders build coherence and a supportive network to enhance their practices. Leaders explore roles that foster a positive culture, promote distributed leadership, and build trust, essential for agency and inclusion.

Testimonials

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Our students are engaged on a whole different level because when they can speak to success criteria…their exchange is so different. They have exchanges referencing the work, and the thinking process.
— Mary Montano

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Through the work of the formative assessment class, teachers have shifted that focus to ‘what are my students going to learn, not what am I teaching today?’ [This means] really looking at what do students need to learn and how are they going to learn it?
— Beth Gaffney

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I think this broader understanding of formative assessment [as] a continuous process of identifying learning gaps and teachers and students working together to close those gaps is what’s so powerful [about this approach].
— Pam Betten

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For me, student agency is really about showing the kids and believing that the kids can do things on their own, that they can take control of their learning and be successful with it.
— Hillary Johannes

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I feel that my role as an assistant superintendent for instruction is to support teachers and school leaders by physically being involved, knowing what it means and being able to help them spread formative assessment through.
— Patty Sealens

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I think before, I thought I was arranging student ownership in the learning, but now that I’m allowing them to take full ownership, they sit down and together we decide exactly what it means to be successful. That ownership is what’s pushing them so much further.
— Courtney Leard and Raleigh Loffer

Testimonials

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When I walk into a classroom and see students that are empowered to own their own learning, students are able to take their learning goals and [can] tell the teacher ‘what will it mean if I’m successful today?’ and then reflect on their work to see [if] they’ve met those goals.
— Shannon Zepp

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I co-construct the success criteria with [students] because it gives them an ownership of what they’re responsible for…and a better understanding of what they need to make sure they include in their writing. I do get excited about [formative assessment] because it truly does work.
— Jill Wyer

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It’s our job at the district level and school-based administration level to spread [awareness] of what [formative assessment] really is and why it’s good for kids.
— Lockerman Leadership

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When [students] came to me at the beginning of the year with their writing, it was ‘what do you think I’m good at?’ And now it’s become a conversation and that’s really what I love about teaching…I want you to figure out what it is that you’re good at.
— Julie Ellertson

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In doing this work with students, my hope is that their identities as learners will continue to flourish and that they will continue to see themselves as readers, scientists, writers, mathematicians, and that they take on these roles and acknowledge their strengths as well as their weaknesses.
— Anissa Jimenez

Testimonials

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You don’t do formative assessment on Tuesday morning … Formative assessment is five days a week, you know, every single lesson … it becomes second nature to you.
— Nanette Longchamp

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If I want this learning target to be accomplished, what else matters? And then build parameters from there.
— Kasie Betten

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When we talk about learning culture in a classroom, we are talking about the conversations, the discourse that’s happening between students and the focus of all of their interactions are around academics.
— Dedee Krause

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He checked on the writing checklist, cause the writing checklist has the punctuation on it. So he looked there, maybe, and he did that.
— Kindergarten Student

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I think the experience of a family, we’re able to correct each other without making fun of them…I I have a question I can ask Gian without feeling like he’s judging me, he’s wanting to help me.
— High School Math Student

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[It’s better to] receive feedback because I know what to change for the next time I do that activity.
— Third Grade Student

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[Your peers] give you specific feedback and they also can help you with your learning.
— Second Grade Student

Resources

The Formative Insights team resources are designed to inform and engage educators, coaches, and leaders in formative assessment practice and learning. Browse our professional learning materials and tools below.

Defining Formative Assessment

Getting Started

Bell and Cowie’s definition of formative assessment as a process of evidence use adopted by WestEd. This resource unpacks their definition and introduces the formative assessment feedback loop.

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Building Blocks to Support Learner Agency

Advancing Formative Assessment

Many see learner agency as a fixed characteristic, either students have it or they don’t. This reading defines agency and details metacognition and self-regulation skills that help students strengthen their agency.

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A Leadership Framework for Sustaining Formative Assessment

Leading Implementation and Scaling

This brief outlines lessons learned in the ‘How I Know’ project and details five specific characteristics of leaders whose sites had successful and sustained formative assessment implementation.

Access the Brief

More Formative Assessment Resources

*Bell, B., & Cowie, B. (2001). The characteristics of formative assessment in science education. Science Education, 85(5), 536–553. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.1022