Ongoing formative assessment systems in school can be a challenge to maintain. We have started this collaborative document to help establish a wider picture of the challenges to success.

Problems | Challenges | Opportunities

• The standardized testing system
• People seeing that it helps with the planning process. It helps teaching according to needs of children and creates more accurate ongoing levelling rather than looking at an end of year test which is often inaccurate. - This is a bit of a sticking point for many staff, they agree with it in principle but find that once they have printed planning it is a document that is fixed in stone. Some of the staff getting to grips with this process tend to get lost in the process and lose sight of longer term goals (this is one of the reasons a 2 week block in the Numeracy Strategy became a 4 week elongated unit)
• All teachers need to use the same formative assessments and then discuss results
• Making time to USE the data
• Teacher & administrator buy-in
• Helping parents to understand what it is and its benefits - they still expect lots of tests and grades
• The use of education as a political pawn does not help. Teachers may know formative assessment is beneficial but hands can be tied by political pressure to test, test, test and test again
• Confusion around the concept of formative assessment’s role in the larger assessment schema. Much of this confusion has been created by publishers who advertise formative assessment as something that is done to students rather than done with them.
• teachers need time to moderate formative assessment to make sure they are all applying approaches consistently. Where I used to teach (science) we were expected to do at least one ‘levelled’ piece of work per topic. This was often administered along the lines of a test and so wasn’t truly formative
• Teachers may not know how to effectively reteach to the students that demonstrated lack-of-mastery on formative assessments
• Teachers and leaders need to see this as a change in philosophy and pedagogy and that will take good cpd and leadership to embed. It is a shift in balance of teachers’ skills; requires planning which doesn’t depend on fixed SOW as has to flex and bend to meet the needs of young people, there can be no ‘one size fits all’. Also time has to given for reflection which means less ‘coverage’ but deeper learning.
• Accountability and audits
• how the results are used is what determines whether the assessment is formative or summative. When teachers assess student learning for purely formative purposes, there is no final mark on the paper and no summative grade in the grade book. If we have to use the word assessment, lets just say ‘assessment for learning’
• formative assessment should be about intended learning, not measuring
• formative assessment practices have the potential to increase student learning, but only where the teachers are ‘geared up’ to adjust instruction and learning activities quickly and responsively while learning is in practice. this is not easy to achieve in classrooms that have not made the ‘transition’ to a more project based learning approach.
• students can benefit from assessment for learning by discovering how to adjust their own learning
• formative assessment can seem quite daunting as differentiation and meeting individual pupil needs in later lessons can become more difficult, as pupils achieve their learning goals at different paces
• pupils themselves often find the transition to formative assessment extremely difficult: the urge to ask “What grade did I get though?” is so strong and deeply set in their minds!
• My school uses an online gradebook for parents: how do we effectively use formative assessment while providing a regularly updated “grade” for the parents? Is it counter-productive? Is it possible to summatively assess formative assessment? I often find the balance difficult to judge.
• Getting teachers to recognize that there are numerous simple, easy to use formative assessment strategies. Formative assessment doesn’t have to be formal or time-consuming. It can be as simple as thumbs up or down, ticket out the door, cell phone polling, etc.
• Realising that giving a grade of any kind mitigates against students valuing of formative assessment.
• Others accepting that formative assessment does not have to be recorded to have happened
• Recognising that formative assessment is for the learner not for the parents of learners, leadership in schools or other professionals.
• Reading “Inside the Black Box” by Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black (This should be in large writing with flashing lights and arrows pointing to it)
• Blended Assessment through online tools can work together with formal written assessment.
• When teachers can’t change the old traditional formal written assessment done in their schools, assessing students through blogs, wikis and other web 2.0 tools can be a good option. Make this online assessment fun and meaningful, not compulsory.
• Needing to “examine the unexamined” and look critically at our grading practices with regards to formative assessments.  If a child starts with a F, but by the end of the unit/term/quarter, can earn an A on that skill, why are we giving them a C?  Is that really a measure of where that child’s skill set lies?
• Too many standards!  When we assess everything, but don’t respond, we’ve done nothing for the learning.  Instead, if time is an issue (which, it certainly is in too many places), let’s narrow down the essential skills and formatively assess them.  Cut the garbage and narrow down what we teach and reteach and hold students accountable to the things they need to know to be successful.  Do they really need to know the names of every capital in every state or province?  Let’s get real with what’s important.  Who cares if they miss one question on the standardized assessment that tests minutia.  
• Within lessons the use of talk is needed for students to crystalise thier understanding of their learning in relation to the expected outcomes to realsie where they are and what they need to do to move forward
• Dylan Williams uses coloured cups to allow instant feedback (red: no clue, yellow:hmm help might be needed, green: I’m sorted) This allows the teacher to get instant feedback, deal with the issues before they become a problem. This sounds a ridiculous system to implement but the payback is worth the short term training.
• The barrier is in the name - assessment is still too often equated to formal testing. Feedback is a much more useful but much trickier thing to do. I think that formative assessment is like a coach working with a team before the match on strategy, defining goals, talking about strengths and weaknesses (in a class this may be looking at the big picture, agreeing learning outcomes, discussing skills that maybe used etc)  as well as the post match analysis of the game (in a class - www (what went well) ebi (even better if) did we achieve, if not why not, being open about the failures in order to learn). Feedback is analogous with the minute by minute coaching from the sidelines; the learning conversations which help to nudge the player/learner back on course, change habits, think about things differently (metacognitive conflict) and focus on making the small learning behaviour changes that can have a huge impact. The barrier is time. You cannot bash through a contentful curriculum without taking feedback (which goes in both directions!) It is a habit you need to get into!
• Some formative assessment techniques can take a lot of time, yet when used effectively, are really powerful - I think the best formative assessment techniques are those that involve the learner directly.
• Realizing that formative assessment goals does not have to be massive work.  My district has ELO (Essential Learner Outcomes) and our formative assessment usually goes back to those.  Often a quick conversation with a student can tell you whether they have understood something.  In fact, speaking to students is one of the biggest ways you can formatively assess (and easiest).
• Using smart ICT tech that is able to both be a means of communication and also a record of assessment would improve the time aspect. Generic web applications like a Primary Pad simultaneous word processor allows you to both take part in simultaneous,
• collaborative learning activities and also make an ongoing and tagged record of achievement. The ability to “play back” and/ or mark key achievements in specific activities based around collaborative effort marks this out as a different ball game.
• The ethos of assessment needs to change as do the outcomes.
• The culture of assessment needs to be tied to mentoring and scaffolding appropriate strategies for learning and these need to be elicited from pupils as well as the teacher so that learning can both be achievable, modelled and transparent. it shouldn’t be locked into silos of individual achievement all of the time. So planning for this needs to take into account different time frames and more pragmatism when setting out group or collaborative tasks. And yes, being able to have time to reflect on achievement with pupils is often more important than what they have achieved in the main because it models a deeper more profound process of learning.
• Will our school formative assessments be acceptable for tertiary acceptance? Changing mindsets on summative assessment as the predominant tertiary qualifier. Re-thinking the sudden transition from secondary to tertiary.
• A focus to change the way teachers teach
• One challenge that I have been facing in the last few years is that as I have been increasing the use of problem solving in my classroom, I have also been encouraging much more collaboration between students.  When students are to experience richer learning, they need to use critical thinking skills.  As students are brainstorming and then completing a task together, it is sometimes difficult to determine each student’s individual contribution and then give appropriate feedback to that child.
• The initial challenge is one of understanding: the most effective formative assessments are embedded within the classroom and happen on a moment to moment basis. So the implementation challenge is developing formative assessment habits in teachers AND students, not designing a system of paper/pencil tests painstakingly aligned to a set of standards (which seems to be the trend of late). "If what you are doing under the heading of assessment for learning involves putting anything into a spreadsheet, then you are not doing the assessment for learning that makes the most difference to student learning." --Dylan Wiliam
• Teachers make mistakes when setting class assessments. With no exam board to check the questions, these error might go unnoticed.
• Is there a danger that AfL can become a tool for tracking progress (so that achievement and progress are emphasised over learning) rather than to inform learning?
• I find it important to use learning continuums in assessing - descriptive ones - and to involve students in metacognition as well. Kids can easily identify what they can do and color these descriptors as they refine and improve their learning.
• Making formative assessment personalised not a group activity, and timely. "If it were done when then 'twere well It were done quickly" These two things would catch misunderstandings early and allow specific targeted intervention. We also might encourage the habit of note taking rather than bookmarking , paraphrasing, mind maps, context diagrams etc.
• Not to over simplify this but I think there are two pieces:
  1. Professional Development
  2. Disconnecting the mindset that learning and teaching are synonymous
• Biggest challenges: Lack of identifying enduring essential standards, evolution of ideas/practice in response to culture/world change.
• Falling into the trap of over testing. At one point recently my district was giving day long tests in reading, math, writing, and science once a marking period, plus benchmarking. It was pointed out to administration we were spending about 1/4 of our time on district assessments in grades 3 - 5. The testing in k-2 was different because most of it was 1:1 with aides taking over classes for whole weeks while teachers tested.
  They announced last year they were reducing the tests way down. We get 1/2 of a unit test each marking period (10 questions) the campus adds in 10 more questions. Students are expected to finish the test inside of class instead of taking all day. Much more reasonable.
  If you are talking about a state level test. They have to take student improvement into account. I teach in a school with a high number of immigrant students with parents who are not literate in English. If a child flunks the 3rd grade test with say 20%, then on the 4th grade test earns a 60% shouldn't we be celebrating the vast improvement.
  Especially if we have other documentation like district assessments that show improvement. Example the child was reading at kinder level when they came to us in 3rd grade. At the end of 3rd grade they test at a mid 2nd grade level. Then in 4th grade they reach an early 4th grade level in reading by May. We should be screaming from the rafters about the child gaining 4 grade levels in 2 years, instead of calling them a failure from 1 test on one day.
• It's the "For want of a nail..." phenomenon. If there are not simple methods to take the assessments, record the scores and archive the data, how can we expect educators to use it?
• Students might copy each other when the assessment is not in exam conditions.
• The initial challenge is one of understanding: the most effective formative assessments are embedded within the classroom and happen on a moment to moment basis. So the implementation challenge is developing formative assessment habits in teachers AND students, not designing a system of paper/pencil tests painstakingly aligned to a set of standards (which seems to be the trend of late).
• 1) how expensive it is to develop and iterate effective formative assessments and
  2) how to overcome the policy temptation to use formative assessments for accountability in a way that undermines the purpose of informing learners on their process.
• Formative assessments have a lot of benefits as well as a lot of disadvantages. I taught in NY which was a heavily assessed state with the Regent’s Exam. Every test needed to be identical to the end of the year assessment (multiple choice and DBQ’s). I found it useful to gauge my students comprehension based off previously released exam questions, but also frustrating with the structure. After moving to PA (there is no state formal assessment) I have seen the direct reason why a formal assessment is needed. I have noticed teachers skip entire units such as the civil rights movement or end us history with the Cold War. It is a disservice to students to have no accountability. As far as formative assessments go they do not need to ALL be multiple choice. Teachers can get creative with project based learning as long as they are authentic assessments that measure student achievement.
• "If what you are doing under the heading of assessment for learning involves putting anything into a spreadsheet, then you are not doing the assessment for learning that makes the most difference to student learning." --Dylan Wiliam
• We perhaps need to learn to assess what pupils have actually achieved rather than what we expect them to achieve.
  That is not to say that there are facts that people need to know to operate in the world. For example 2+2 = 4 is a rule or fact that is not open to debate although I suppose one could explore the concept. by that I am saying that there are things that pupils do need to know and therefore should be assessed on.
• I agree with much above. Danger of testing everything (or nothing...). Also, institutuonal memory and atrophy as either too many teachers leave (or not enough).
• I agree with Brandt Schneider and Robert Hill, and it makes sense to have technology and other processes in place that are immune to changes in staff, no matter the level. It is and has always been a weakness when trying to actively and accurately using valid data in teaching. Before computers became widely available, there were few assessments, now there are a multitude. Let's use the technology to lessen the book-keeping tasks of teaching. Let's use the data and teach!
• One of the barriers to effective assessment for learning is the classroom culture of the traditional classroom where students are compared to one another.  Rather, each student should set learning goals (with the help of the facilitator) then keep track of where they are in relation to those goals.  Personal progress should be measured and acknowledged by the student themselves as we empower them in their own learning.  

Contributors (Name and Country)

• Jayme Linton, US
• Nicki Allman, UK
• Meribeth Bouchard US
• Fiona Luna, UK
• Marion Frankland, UK
• James Brauer, US
• Noel Ryan, Australia
• Marie-Clare Rankin, UK
• Judy O’Connell, Australia
• Peter Blenkinsop, UK
• Eduardo Santos, Brazil
• Mary Phillips, US
• Gareth Kirkpatrick UK
• Chris Harte UK
• Rob Clarke, NZ
• Leon Cych UK
• Marie Swift, Canada
• Pernille Ripp USA
• Brayden Stone, Australia
• Tony Searl, Australia
• Tracy Olorenshaw , NZ
• Tyson Spraul, US
• Paul Benson, UK
• Cristina Milos, Romania
• Melissa Seideman, US blog- http://notanotherhistoryteacher.edublogs.org/
• Cathy Box, USA