Table of Contents
Type: Discursive Essay | Subject: Education | Level: Masters | Word Count: ~2,850 words
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Overview: This model MA Education discursive essay weighs the research and policy evidence on whether formative assessment raises attainment in English secondary schools. It sets out the theoretical case for assessment for learning, examines the methodological and practical criticisms levelled against it, and argues that the practice does raise attainment but only under conditions of faithful, well-supported implementation.
Formative assessment — the continuous, in-lesson gathering of evidence about what pupils know and can do, used to adapt teaching while learning is still taking place — has become one of the most influential ideas in English secondary education over the past three decades. Since the Assessment Reform Group and the seminal review by Black and Wiliam (1998) brought the concept to wide professional attention, “assessment for learning” has been written into teacher training, school improvement plans and the language of inspection. Yet the confident claim that formative assessment reliably raises attainment deserves careful scrutiny. The research base is large but methodologically uneven; the practice is defined in markedly different ways by different authors; and the particular conditions of the secondary school — subject specialism, high-stakes examinations and acute workload pressures — complicate any straightforward transfer from theory to classroom.
This essay argues that formative assessment can raise attainment in secondary schools, and that the mechanisms by which it does so are well theorised, but that the extent of its effect is conditional rather than guaranteed. The size of any gain depends heavily on the fidelity of implementation, the quality of teacher feedback and the accountability culture within which teachers work. The discussion first defines formative assessment and its theoretical basis; it then weighs the supporting evidence against the critics who regard the claims as overstated; and it finally considers the mediating factors and policy context that determine how far the promise of the idea is realised in practice. The aim throughout is to move beyond the slogan that assessment for learning “works” towards a more precise account of when, for whom and under what conditions it does so.
At its most basic, formative assessment is distinguished from summative assessment not by the instrument used but by the purpose to which the resulting information is put. A test, a question or a piece of written work becomes formative only when the evidence it generates is actually used to close the gap between a learner’s current and desired performance. Sadler (1989) offered the foundational account of this process, arguing that productive feedback requires three conditions to be met: the learner must hold a concept of the standard being aimed for; must be able to compare their current performance against that standard; and must be able to act in ways that close the distance between the two. Feedback that merely reports a grade, on this account, is not formative at all, because it does not equip the learner to act. This deceptively simple insight reframes assessment as part of the process of learning rather than a judgement delivered once learning has finished.
Wiliam and Thompson (2008) later distilled this thinking into five key strategies that have since become a common organising framework in English schools. These strategies, summarised below, span the roles of teacher, peer and learner.
| Strategy | What It Involves in Practice |
|---|---|
| Clarifying and sharing learning intentions and success criteria | Ensuring pupils understand what quality looks like before they begin a task |
| Engineering effective discussions and tasks that elicit evidence of learning | Designing questions and activities that make pupils’ thinking visible to the teacher |
| Providing feedback that moves learners forward | Comments that tell pupils what to do next rather than simply how well they have done |
| Activating pupils as instructional resources for one another | Structured peer assessment and collaborative review against shared criteria |
| Activating pupils as owners of their own learning | Developing self-assessment and the metacognitive regulation of learning |
The framework matters because it reframes formative assessment not as an occasional event but as a continuous feature of pedagogy. This is also where definitional difficulty begins. Because the term spans everything from a spontaneous question in a mid-lesson discussion to a structured programme of fortnightly interim testing, studies that claim to measure “formative assessment” are frequently measuring quite different things. Any judgement about its effect on attainment must therefore begin by asking which version of the practice is under examination, a point to which the critical literature returns with some force.
The strongest case for formative assessment rests on a combination of influential review evidence and a plausible theoretical mechanism. Black and Wiliam’s (1998) review of several hundred studies concluded that strengthening classroom formative practice produced learning gains that were, by their account, among the largest reported for any educational intervention, with reported effect sizes commonly cited in the region of 0.4 to 0.7 standard deviations. Hattie’s (2009) later synthesis of meta-analyses placed feedback among the most powerful influences on achievement, and the Education Endowment Foundation (2021) continues to rank well-targeted feedback as a high-impact, comparatively low-cost strategy in its guidance for English schools. Crucially, these claims are not merely empirical; they are supported by a coherent explanation of why the practice should work.
The mechanism at the heart of formative assessment is feedback, and Hattie and Timperley (2007) provide the most widely used model of how it operates. They argue that effective feedback helps the learner answer three questions:
Their model further suggests that feedback is most powerful when it addresses the task and the pupil’s self-regulation, and least useful when it is directed at the self as a person. Praise untethered from the work tends to have little or even a counter-productive effect on subsequent performance. In a secondary classroom this distinction is significant. Consider, by way of illustration, a Year 10 pupil who receives a mark of five out of ten: they learn only that their work was mediocre. The same pupil, told specifically that their analytical paragraphs assert conclusions without supporting evidence, and shown how to weave a short quotation into an argument, is given a route forward. The former is assessment of learning; only the latter is assessment for learning. The research consensus is that it is the actionable, task-focused quality of feedback, not its quantity, that determines whether attainment improves.
A second mechanism concerns the way teachers elicit evidence of understanding in real time. Much ordinary classroom questioning is dominated by a rapid initiation–response–evaluation pattern in which a small number of confident pupils supply brief answers and the teacher moves on, gathering little reliable information about the class as a whole. Formative questioning techniques are designed to counter this: extending the wait time after a question, sampling responses without hands up, posing diagnostic multiple-choice items constructed around common misconceptions, and requiring every pupil to respond simultaneously through mini-whiteboards. The purpose is to make the thinking of the whole class visible so that the teacher can adapt the next step of the lesson. The decisive test is the same as before: when questioning genuinely changes what the teacher does next, it is formative; when it is simply a check that the planned lesson can proceed, it is not.
The final pair of strategies shifts some of the regulatory work onto pupils themselves. By assessing a peer’s work against shared success criteria, pupils rehearse the standard and often internalise it more readily than through teacher comment alone; by assessing their own work, they develop the metacognitive capacity to monitor and regulate their learning that Wiliam (2011) regards as the ultimate aim of the whole enterprise. These strategies are attractive partly because they are sustainable: they distribute feedback across a class of thirty rather than concentrating it on a single, overburdened teacher. They are also, however, the strategies most vulnerable to superficial implementation, since the mere ritual of swapping books or colouring in a self-rating scale produces none of the cognitive engagement on which the benefit depends. This vulnerability points directly to the weaknesses in the case, to which the discussion now turns.
For all the confidence of the headline claims, the evidence that formative assessment raises attainment is considerably less settled than its ubiquity in schools would suggest. Two lines of criticism are especially important: the quality of the underlying research, and the gap between the idea and its enactment.
Bennett (2011), in an influential critical review, argued that the research base is weaker than commonly assumed, that the definition of formative assessment is too elastic to support a single, stable effect size, and that the frequently repeated figures could not be traced to a defensible meta-analysis of genuinely comparable studies. Dunn and Mulvenon (2009) reached a similar conclusion, cautioning that much of the professional enthusiasm rests on studies with weak designs and inconsistent outcome measures. When Kingston and Nash (2011) conducted a meta-analysis restricted to more rigorous studies, they reported an average effect substantially more modest than the figures that had driven early policy — real and worthwhile, but far from transformative. The lesson is not that formative assessment fails to work, but that the precise, confident numbers often quoted in professional development overstate the certainty of the evidence. There is a further, structural obstacle to clean causal claims: because formative practice is woven into the fabric of everyday teaching, it is extremely difficult to isolate experimentally, as a randomised comparison would require the control group to be deliberately denied good feedback, which is neither feasible nor ethical at scale.
A second, arguably more important, difficulty is that formative assessment is easy to adopt in name and hard to enact in substance. Wiliam himself has described how the approach is prone to “lethal mutations”, in which schools retain the surface features — learning objectives copied from the board, traffic-light self-rating, the ubiquitous “two stars and a wish” — while losing the underlying principle that evidence should actually change teaching. Torrance (2007) identified a related distortion he termed “criteria compliance”, whereby the sharing of explicit success criteria, intended to empower learners, instead narrows their effort to the mechanical pursuit of marks and discourages the independent judgement that higher attainment requires. In such cases the paraphernalia of formative assessment is present but its function is absent, and it would be surprising if attainment rose as a result. This has a sobering methodological implication: many studies of formative assessment are, in effect, studies of how well a particular programme was implemented, so that generic claims about the impact of the practice are only ever as good as the professional learning that accompanied it.
Even where teachers understand the principles, the conditions of the English secondary school shape how far formative assessment can raise attainment. Several factors are particularly salient: the accountability system, teacher workload, the subject-specialist structure of secondary teaching, and the equity dimension.
The English secondary system is organised around high-stakes summative examinations at sixteen and eighteen, published performance measures and periodic inspection. This accountability culture pulls powerfully against genuinely formative practice. Under pressure to demonstrate measurable progress, schools often convert formative intentions into frequent summative testing, re-labelling interim assessments as “formative” while using them principally to generate predicted grades rather than to adapt teaching. Comment-only marking, which the evidence suggests is more effective than grading because it directs attention to the task rather than the ego, is difficult to sustain when parents, pupils and senior leaders expect a steady supply of grades. Workload is a further and severe constraint: individualised written feedback on the exercise books of well over a hundred pupils a week is simply not sustainable, and the Education Endowment Foundation (2021) has explicitly cautioned schools against feedback policies that are onerous for teachers without being demonstrably better for pupils. The uncomfortable conclusion is that the practices most likely to raise attainment are often those least compatible with the system’s accountability demands.
A factor peculiar to the secondary phase is that teaching is organised by subject specialism, and formative assessment does not travel uniformly across disciplines. In mathematics, where many concepts have unambiguous right answers and a well-mapped set of predictable misconceptions, diagnostic questioning and rapid whole-class checking can be exceptionally precise, allowing a teacher to identify and address an error before it becomes entrenched. In subjects such as English literature or history, by contrast, quality is a matter of interpretation, argument and the marshalling of evidence, so that success criteria are far harder to specify without reducing sophisticated performance to a checklist — precisely the criteria-compliance trap that Torrance (2007) warned against. Practical and performance subjects, including art, physical education and laboratory science, rely heavily on immediate oral feedback given in the moment of doing, which leaves little durable record for a tracking system to capture. A secondary teacher moving between year groups and attainment sets across a single day must therefore translate the general principles of assessment for learning into quite different disciplinary practices. This helps to explain why whole-school formative assessment policies, imposed uniformly across departments, so often founder: the practice that raises attainment in one subject can be hollow ritual in another, and genuine impact depends on departmental expertise that a generic policy cannot supply.
A more optimistic consideration concerns equity. Because formative assessment makes expectations explicit and provides actionable guidance, it may particularly benefit pupils who do not arrive at school already fluent in the implicit codes of academic success — disproportionately, though not exclusively, those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Shared success criteria and structured feedback can demystify what good work looks like, rather than quietly rewarding the pupils who have absorbed those standards at home. There is, however, a genuine risk in the opposite direction: if self- and peer-assessment are introduced without careful scaffolding, more confident and advantaged pupils may exploit them more effectively, and the attainment gap may widen rather than narrow. The equity case for formative assessment is therefore real but conditional, resting entirely on skilful, deliberate implementation rather than on the adoption of the techniques alone.
The policy context in England has shifted in ways that make this debate newly urgent. The removal of National Curriculum levels in 2014 dismantled the shared descriptive vocabulary that teachers had used, however imperfectly, to locate pupils’ progress and to frame formative conversations. The subsequent report of the Commission on Assessment without Levels (Department for Education, 2015) encouraged schools to design their own assessment systems and reaffirmed the value of formative assessment, but left individual schools to construct replacements of very uneven quality. In some settings this freedom has supported thoughtful, genuinely diagnostic approaches; in others it has produced elaborate internal tracking systems that mimic the old levels and reintroduce summative judgement under a formative label. The inspectorate’s renewed emphasis on the integrity of the curriculum, and on assessment that checks understanding rather than merely harvesting data, has created space for better practice, but it has not resolved the underlying tension between formative purposes and accountability pressures.
This pattern is long-standing. Formative assessment entered English policy not as a grassroots movement but as a centrally promoted reform, and reforms transmitted through guidance and inspection rather than through sustained, subject-specific professional development are especially liable to the mutations described earlier. The quality of initial teacher training and of ongoing in-service support therefore does much to determine whether the policy endorsement of assessment for learning translates into the classroom behaviours that actually move learning forward. Policy, in short, has repeatedly endorsed formative assessment in principle while preserving the high-stakes structures that undermine it in practice.
Returning to the question of extent, the evidence supports a qualified rather than an unconditional answer. Formative assessment rests on a sound theoretical foundation: Sadler’s account of closing the gap, Hattie and Timperley’s model of feedback, and the five-strategy framework together explain convincingly why using evidence of learning to adapt teaching should improve outcomes, and the balance of review evidence indicates that, in general, it does. The extent of the benefit, however, has been overstated by the confident effect sizes that circulated in early advocacy; more cautious syntheses point to a real but moderate impact, and that impact is highly contingent. Formative assessment raises attainment substantially where feedback is specific and acted upon, where questioning genuinely reshapes teaching, and where pupils are developed as self-regulating learners; it raises attainment little or not at all where its surface forms are adopted without its underlying logic, or where accountability pressures convert it back into disguised summative testing. For secondary schools, the implication is that formative assessment is not a technique to be mandated but a disposition to be cultivated, through sustained and subject-specific professional learning and through accountability structures that reward genuine responsiveness rather than the mere generation of data. On that reading, the answer to the title question is that formative assessment raises attainment to a considerable extent, but only under conditions that schools must work deliberately and continually to create.
Assessment Reform Group (2002) Assessment for Learning: 10 Principles. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Faculty of Education.
Bennett, R.E. (2011) ‘Formative assessment: a critical review’, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 18(1), pp. 5–25.
Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B. and Wiliam, D. (2003) Assessment for Learning: Putting It into Practice. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998) Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment. London: nferNelson.
Department for Education (2015) Final Report of the Commission on Assessment without Levels. London: Department for Education.
Dunn, K.E. and Mulvenon, S.W. (2009) ‘A critical review of research on formative assessment: the limited scientific evidence of the impact of formative assessment in education’, Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 14(7), pp. 1–11.
Education Endowment Foundation (2021) Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning: Guidance Report. London: Education Endowment Foundation.
Hattie, J. (2009) Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. London: Routledge.
Hattie, J. and Timperley, H. (2007) ‘The power of feedback’, Review of Educational Research, 77(1), pp. 81–112.
Kingston, N. and Nash, B. (2011) ‘Formative assessment: a meta-analysis and a call for research’, Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 30(4), pp. 28–37.
Sadler, D.R. (1989) ‘Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’, Instructional Science, 18(2), pp. 119–144.
Torrance, H. (2007) ‘Assessment as learning? How the use of explicit learning objectives, assessment criteria and feedback in post-secondary education and training can come to dominate learning’, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 14(3), pp. 281–294.
Wiliam, D. (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.
Wiliam, D. and Thompson, M. (2008) ‘Integrating assessment with learning: what will it take to make it work?’, in Dwyer, C.A. (ed.) The Future of Assessment: Shaping Teaching and Learning. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 53–82.
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