Reclaiming an Important Teacher Competency: The Lost Art of Formative Assessment

We live in an era in which standardized assessments play a necessary and important role in the mission of our public schools to provide equal and equitable educational opportunity to all students. However, our focus on summative accountability measures often has an eclipsing effect on the equally important role of formative assessment practices in the classroom. This article describes why and how formative assessment should be integral to classroom teaching, and it suggests the importance of focusing on teachers’ instructionally-based, formative assessment competencies through our teacher evaluation systems.