ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the best answer to the question of the domain-specificity of formative assessment is that formative assessment is irreducibly both domain-specific and domain-general, as implemented in the King’s-Medway-Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project. It deals with a report of a large-scale randomized controlled trial of a generic approach to formative assessment that produced significant increases in student achievement at minimal cost. The chapter shows that the optimal approach to using formative assessment to improve student achievement at scale has to recognize that formative assessment is both domain-general and domain-specific. Given the reasonably clear evidence about the effectiveness of formative assessment to raise student achievement even where such achievement is measured through standardized tests, anything that dissuades teachers from embracing formative assessment because of the restrictions applied is, in effect, a way of lowering student achievement. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
