Ms. Looney,
 
Thank you so much for taking the time to share your findings and respond
to some of our questions.  This is an extremely timely topic for us to
explore here in the U.S.  I am very interested in hearing you discuss in
some detail these two points of the study:
 
"The study shows how teachers have addressed barriers to systematic
practice, and how school and policy leaders may apply the principles of
formative assessment to promote constructive cultures of assessment and
evaluation throughout education systems."
 
Specifically:
Can you discuss further how formative assessment is not practiced
systematically in secondary schools?  Does this refer to certain schools
using the practice and others not, or rather, that formative assessment
is used for certain purposes within a school or school system, but is
not practiced in all aspects of the school (system)?
 
Formative assessment is an excellent approach for informing the teaching
and learning process.  Can you discuss how formative assessment is also
useful at the evaluation level - for example, for purposes of examining
success on the program or system level?  
 
I'm not sure how the systems you studied are funded/supported, but is
formative assessment used for reporting purposes to funders or
government agencies?  How is this achieved?  
 
In the systems that you researched, how are formative assessments
developed and used?  Are they uniform or standardized?  Are there
guidelines for development?  Who develops the assessments?  Is special
training involved for administrators, teachers, or others using the
assessments?
 
Thank you for your responses.
 
Marie Cora
 
 
Marie Cora
NIFL Assessment Discussion List Moderator
marie.cora at hotspurpartners.com
Coordinator, LINCS Assessment Special Collection
http://literacy.kent.edu/Midwest/assessment/
 
 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/specialtopics/attachments/20060902/4b0d19e6/attachment.html