Assessment for Learning

What is assessment for learning?

Assessment for learning (AFL) is an approach to teaching and learning that creates feedback which is then used to improve students’ performance. Students become more involved in the learning process and from this gain confidence in what they are expected to learn and to what standard.

One way of thinking about AFL is that it aims to ‘close the gap’ between a learner’s current situation and where they want to be in their learning and achievement. Skilled teachers plan tasks which help learners to do this.

AFL involves students becoming more active in their learning and starting to ‘think like a teacher’. They think more actively about where they are now, where they are going and how to get there.

Effective teachers integrate AFL in their lessons as a natural part of what they do, choosing how much or how little to use the method. AFL can be adapted to suit the age and ability of the learners involved.

AFL strategies are directly linked to improvements in student performance in summative tests and examinations. Research shows that these strategies particularly help low-achieving students to enhance their learning.

AFL and the relationship with formative and summative assessment

Traditionally, AFL has been closely associated with formative assessment because practices such as questioning and providing feedback help ‘form’ or ‘shape’ student learning. This differs from summative assessment which typically is an attempt to measure student attainment at the end of a period of learning.

The following table, based on the UK’s National Foundation for Educational Research report(NFER 2007), classifies types of formative and summative assessment as either formal or informal.

It can be argued that all of the assessment strategies in this table support AFL if their ultimate use is to help the student progress in terms of their learning.

A good example of using a summative assessment strategy in an AFL context is where a test or exam is used to identify a lack of understanding (e.g. in a particular area of the syllabus) and subsequently targets are set to rectify this.

"In AFL, it is the purpose of assessment, rather than the nature of it, that is important."

There are five main processes that take place in assessment for learning:

(i) Questioning enables a student, with the help of their teacher, to find out what level they are at.

(ii) The teacher provides feedback to each student about how to improve their learning.

(iii) Students understand what successful work looks like for each task they are doing.

(iv) Students become more independent in their learning, taking part in peer assessment and self-assessment.

(v) Summative assessments (e.g. the student’s exam or portfolio submission) are also used formatively to help them improve.

Educational Assessment (summative assessment)

Educational assessment or educational evaluation is the systematic process of documenting and using empirical data on the knowledge, skill, attitudes, and beliefs to refine programs and improve student learning. 

Assessment data can be obtained from directly examining student work to assess the achievement of learning outcomes or can be based on data from which one can make inferences about learning. Assessment is often used interchangeably with test, but not limited to tests. Assessment can focus on the individual learner, the learning community (class, workshop, or other organized group of learners), a course, an academic program, the institution, or the educational system as a whole (also known as granularity). The word 'assessment' came into use in an educational context after the Second World War.

As a continuous process, assessment establishes measurable and clear student learning outcomes for learning, provisioning a sufficient amount of learning opportunities to achieve these outcomes, implementing a systematic way of gathering, analyzing and interpreting evidence to determine how well student learning matches expectations, and using the collected information to inform improvement in student learning.

The final purpose of assessment practices in education depends on the theoretical framework of the practitioners and researchers, their assumptions and beliefs about the nature of human mind, the origin of knowledge, and the process of learning.