What is an essential component of formative assessment?

An essential component of formative assessment is the provision of feedback for immediate improvement. Formative assessments are designed to monitor student learning and provide ongoing feedback that can be used by both students and instructors to enhance learning. The feedback given during formative assessments helps students understand their strengths and weaknesses in real time, allowing them to make necessary adjustments to their learning strategies and efforts.

This immediate feedback mechanism encourages a growth mindset, enabling learners to understand that they can improve through hard work and dedication. Formative assessments are typically more informal and take place during the learning process, as opposed to at the end, helping to inform instruction and guide future teaching practices.

Other options, such as a single final exam or standardized testing practices, focus on summative assessments that evaluate overall learning at the end of an instructional period and do not facilitate ongoing learning adjustments. Similarly, while using historical data can inform instruction, it does not provide the real-time feedback characteristic of formative assessments.