ABSTRACT
Formative assessment is an elusive practice for many teachers. Formative assessment as an instrument or task refers to the object or material artifact that a teacher uses to organize classroom activity around the sharing of student ideas. When discussing formative assessment as a process or set of practices, one might focus on the types of participation structures a teacher uses in her or his classroom to create space for students to share their thinking as well as the types of open-ended, authentic questions the teachers ask to surface student ideas. Whether one is talking about formative assessment tasks or processes, an important element of the conversation is the type of feedback a student receives to improve his or her performance. The types and quality of feedback that teachers might provide in the context of formative assessment varies, and this variation has been shown to relate to the extent to which it influences performance.
