ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the development of one particular approach to the use of evidence to improve education – the idea that assessment can be used to improve teaching as well as measuring its effects – from the work of Benjamin Bloom’s early work on mastery learning in the late 1960s to its widespread adoption as a policy priority in education systems around the world in the last decade. The chapter shows how two distinct strands – the idea that students should be involved in documenting their own achievements at school (records of achievement) and the use of assessment by teachers to determine the effects of their teaching, came together to create a vision of formative assessment that included teachers, learners, and their peers, as key agents in using evidence of achievement to make better decisions about next steps in instruction. The chapter then details how, following small-scale “proof of concept” projects that demonstrated that using classroom formative assessment was both practicable, and effective in raising students achievement even on standardised tests and examinations, attention shifted to how such improvements could be effected at scale, at minimal cost, and without external support, through the use of teacher-led, school-based, teacher learning communities which led to the development of the Embedded Formative Assessment (EFA) programme. The chapter concludes with a description of a large-scale cluster-randomised trial of the EFA programme in over 120 secondary schools in England which showed that giving teachers 75 minutes once a month, to meet in groups of 8 to 12 and hold each other accountable for making changes to their classrooms practice, combined with peer observation, resulted in an increase in student achievement on the national school leaving examinations in England equivalent to increasing the rate of learning by 25%.
