A situative response to the conundrum of formative assessment

While formative assessment is popular, it is difficult to evaluate and improve. In some settings, it may actually reduce disciplinary learning by competing with other more productive activities, making those activities less engaging, and narrowing curricular goals. Situative approaches to educational assessment offer a solution by (a) blurring the distinction between instruction and assessment, (b) moving beyond the intended purposes of assessment to focus on actual functions and (c) using the same assessment to accomplish multiple functions. Framing instruction, assessment and testing as primarily social practices and placing them on a continuum of assessment formality offers a coherent framework for aligning learning across different assessments and balancing functions within particular assessments. This paper introduces an approach called Participatory Assessment that has been used successfully to enhance (a) communal engagement, (b) individual knowledge and (c) aggregated achievement of standards, while (d) providing valid evidence of those refinements.