What Does Formative Assessment Mean to a State Department of Education?
ONLINE: At the request of the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), NECC collaborated with the Assessment and Accountability Comprehensive Center (AACC) to offer a webinar on Formative Assessment featuring national expert Margaret Heritage. Peers from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire departments of education joined representatives from Rhode Island for the event. NEECs liaison to the AACC, Steve Hamilton, explained that there is some confusion between actual formative assessments and assessments advertised as “formative” that are really more “benchmark.” The webinar was intended as an initial step in developing a common language. “Formative assessment might as easily have been called formative instruction,'” Heritage explained in the webinar: it’s about using feedback “to close the gap between current learning and desired goals.” She likened formative assessment to an engineers continuous check that a train is staying on the rails. Benchmark assessments are too infr
