Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems

Author(s): D. ROYCE SADLER

Source: Instructional Science, Vol. 18, No. 2 (June 1989), pp. 119-144
Published by: Springer
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Instructional Science 18: 119-144 (1989) 119
© Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands

Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems

D. ROYCE SADLER
Assessment and Evaluation Research Unit, Department of Education, University of Queensland,
St Lucia, Queensland 4067, Australia

Abstract. The theory of formative assessment outlined in this article is relevant to a broad spectrum of
learning outcomes in a wide variety of subjects. Specifically, it applies wherever multiple criteria are
used in making judgments about the quality of student responses. The theory has less relevance for
outcomes in which student responses may be assessed simply as correct or incorrect. Feedback is
defined in a particular way to highlight its function in formative assessment. This definition differs in
several significant respects from that traditionally found in educational research. Three conditions for
effective feedback are then identified and their implications discussed. A key premise is that for stu
dents to be able to improve, they must develop the capacity to monitor the quality of their own work
during actual production. This in turn requires that students possess an appreciation of what high qual
ity work is, that they have the evaluative skill necessary for them to compare with some objectivity the
quality of what they are producing in relation to the higher standard, and that they develop a store of
tactics or moves which can be drawn upon to modify their own work. It is argued that these skills can
be developed by providing direct authentic evaluative experience for students. Instructional systems
which do not make explicit provision for the acquisition of evaluative expertise are deficient, because
they set up artificial but potentially removable performance ceilings for students.

Introduction

This article is about the nature and function of formative assessment in the devel
opment of expertise. It is relevant to a wide variety of instructional systems in
which student outcomes are appraised qualitatively using multiple criteria. The
focus is on judgments about the quality of student work: who makes the judg
ments, how they are made, how they may be refined, and how they may be put to
use in bringing about improvement. The article is prompted by two overlapping
concerns. The firstis with the lack of a general theory of feedback and formative
assessment in complex learning settings. The second concern follows from the
common but puzzling observation that even when teachers provide students with
valid and reliable judgments about the quality of their work, improvement does
not necessarily follow. Students often show little or no growth or development
despite regular, accurate feedback. The concern itself is with whether some lear
ners fail to acquire expertise because of specific deficiencies in the instructional
system associated with formative assessment.
The discussion begins with definitions of feedback, formative assessment and
qualitative judgments. This is followed by an analysis of certain patterns in
teacher-student assessment interactions. A number of causal and conditional

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linkages are then identified. These in turn are shown to have implications for the
design of instructional systems which are intended to develop the ability of
students to exercise executive control over their own productive activities, and
eventually to become independent and fully self-monitoring.

Formative assessment, feedback and self-monitoring

Etymology and common usage associate the adjective formative with forming or
moulding something, usually to achieve a desired end. In this article, assessment
denotes any appraisal (or judgment, or evaluation) of a student's work or perfor
mance. (In some contexts, assessment is given a narrower and more specialized
meaning; some North American readers in particular may prefer to substitute the
term evaluation for assessment.)

Formative assessment is concerned with how judgments about the quality of

student responses (performances, pieces, or works) can be used to shape and
improve the student's competence by short-circuiting the randomness and ineffi
ciency of trial-and-errorlearning.
Summative contrasts with formative assessment in that it is concerned with
summing up or summarizing the achievement status of a student, and is geared
towards reporting at the end of a course of study especially for purposes of certifi
cation. It is essentially passive and does not normally have immediate impact on
learning, although it often influences decisions which may have profound educa
tional and personal consequences for the student The primary distinction between

formative and summative assessment relates to purpose and effect, not to timing.

It is argued below that many of the principles appropriate to summative assess

ment are not necessarily transferable to formative assessment; the latter requires a

distinctive conceptualization and technology.

Feedback is a key element in formative assessment, and is usually defined in
terms of information about how successfully something has been or is being done.
Few physical, intellectual or social skills can be acquired satisfactorily simply
through being told about them. Most require practice in a supportive environment
which incorporates feedback loops. This usually includes a teacher who knows
which skills are to be learned, and who can recognize and describe a fine perfor
mance, demonstrate a fine performance, and indicate how a poor performance can
be improved. Feedback can also be defined in terms of its effect rather than its
informational content; "Feedback is information about the gap between the actual
level and the reference level of a system parameter which is used to alter the gap
in some way" (Ramaprasad, 1983, p. 4). This alternative definition emphasizes
the system-control function. Broadly speaking, feedback provides for two main
audiences, the teacher and the student. Teachers use feedback to make program
matic decisions with respect to readiness, diagnosis and remediation. Students use

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 121

it to monitor the strengths and weaknesses of their performances, so that aspects

associated with success or high quality can be recognized and reinforced, and
unsatisfactory aspects modified or improved.
An important feature of Ramaprasad's definition is that information about the

gap between actual and reference levels is considered as feedback only when it is
used to alter the gap. If the information is simply recorded, passed to a third party
who lacks either the knowledge or the power to change the outcome, or is too
deeply coded (for example, as a summary grade given by the teacher) to lead to
appropriate action, the control loop cannot be closed and "dangling data" substi
tute for effective feedback. In any area of the curriculum where a grade or score
assigned by a teacher constitutes a one-way cipher for students, attention is
diverted away from fundamental judgments and the criteria for making them. A
grade therefore may actually be counterproductive for formative purposes.
In assessing the quality of a student's work or performance, the teacher must
possess a concept of quality appropriate to the task, and be able to judge the stu
dent's work in relation to that concept. But although the students may accept a
teacher's judgment without demur, they need more than summary grades if they
are to develop expertise intelligently. The indispensable conditions for improve
ment are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that

held by the teacher, is able to monitor continuously the quality of what is being
produced during the act of production itself, and has a repertoire of alternative
moves or strategies from which to draw at any given point. In other words, stu
dents have to be able to judge the quality of what they are producing and be able
to regulate what they are doing during the doing of it. As Shenstone (correctly)
put it over two centuries ago, "Every good poet includes a critick; the reverse will
not hold" (Shenstone, 1768, p. 172).
Stated explicitly, therefore, the learner has to (a) possess a concept of the stan
dard (or goal, or reference level) being aimed for, (b) compare the actual (or cur
rent) level of performance with the standard, and (c) engage in appropriate action
which leads to some closure of the gap. These three conditions form the organiz
ing framework for this article. It will be argued that they are necessary conditions,
which must be satisfied simultaneously rather than as sequential steps. It is never
theless useful to make a conceptual distinction between the conditions. The
(macro) process of grading involves the first two in that it is essentially compar
ing a particular case either with a standard or with one or more other cases.
Control during production involves all three conditions and is, by contrast, a
(micro) process carried out in real time. Judging from assessment practices com
mon in many subjects, information generated without the participation of the lear
ner but made available to the learner from time to time (as intelligence) is
evidently assumed to satisfy these conditions. A detailed examination of the three
conditions shows why this assumption falls short of what is actually necessary.

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For purposes of discussion, it is convenient to make a distinction between feed

back and self-monitoring according to the source of the evaluative information. If
the learner generates the relevant information, the procedure is part of self
monitoring. If the source of information is external to the learner, it is associated
with feedback. In both cases, it is assumed that there has to be some closure of the
gap for feedback and self-monitoring to be labelled as such. Formative assessment
includes both feedback and self-monitoring. The goal of many instructional sys
tems is to facilitate the transition from feedback to self-monitoring.

Feedback and formative assessment in the literature

Authors of textbooks on measurement and assessment published during the past

25 years have placed great emphasis on achieving high content validity in teacher
made tests, producing reliable scores or grades, and the statistical manipulation or
interpretation of scores. Only cursory attention has usually been given to feedback
and formative assessment, and then it is mostly hortatory, recipe-like and atheo
retic. In many cases feedback and formative assessment (or their equivalents) are
not mentioned at all in either the body of the text or the index, although the books
by Rowntree (1977), Bloom, Madaus and Hastings (1981), Black and Dockrell
(1984) and Chater (1984) are notable exceptions.
In general, a concern with the aims of summative assessment has dominated
the field in terms of both research and the guidance given to teachers (Black,
1986). This dominance is implicit in the treatment given, for instance, to reliabil
ity and validity. Textbooks almost invariably describe how the validity (of assess
ments) is to be distinguished from the reliability (of grades or classifications).
Reliability is usually (and correctly) said to be a necessary but not sufficient con
dition for validity, because measurements or judgments may be reliable in the
sense of being consistent over time or over judges and still be off-target (or
invalid). Reliability is therefore presented as a precondition for a determination of
validity. In discussing formative assessment, however, the relation between relia
bility and validity is more appropriately stated as follows: validity is a sufficient
but not necessary condition for reliability. Attention to the validity of judgments
about individual pieces of work should take precedence over attention to reliabil
ity of grading in any context where the emphasis is on diagnosis and improve
ment. Reliability will follow as a corollary. Acceptance of this principle, which is
emphasized by only a few writers (such as Nitko, 1983), has implications for how
the process of appraisal is conceptualized, and the mechanisms of improvement
understood.
In the literature on learning research, feedback is usually identified with know
ledge of results (often abbreviated to KR), a concept which gained considerable
currency through Thorndike's (1913) so-called Law of Effect. Reviewing a series

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of experimental studies on learning from written materials (texts and programmed

instruction), Kulhavy (1977, p. 211) defined feedback as "any of the numerous
procedures that are used to tell a learner if an instructional response is right or
wrong". Kulik and Kulik (1988) adopted a similar definition in their review of
research on the timing of feedback. Learning researchers have been particularly
interested in the effect of various feedback characteristics (such as immediacy,
pertinence, data form and type of reward) on the retention of learned material.
The research hypotheses tested have almost invariably been based on stimulus
response learning theories, the aim being to discover the types of stimuli and
incentives that promote learning. For the most part, this line of research has been
confined to learning outcomes that can be assessed by quizzes and progress tests
consisting of problems to be solved or objective items that can be scored correct
or incorrect. The learning programs are conceived of as divisible into logically
dependent units which can be mastered more or less sequentially, one by one. The
resulting technology is associated with test scores, diagnostic items, criterion
referencing and mastery learning.
Other lines of research occur in specific subject areas. Of particular interest is
the literature on the assessment of writing, which contains descriptions of a num
ber of differentapproaches, including assessment by means of general impression,
analytic scales, primary traits, syntactic features, relative readability and intellec
tual strategy (Gere, 1980). These differ not only in procedural detail, but also in
their theoretical bases. Much of the discussion about and evaluation of the various
possibilities has revolved around which assessment criteria should be used (and
how), which of the techniques has the soundest theoretical foundation (such as a
theory of composition), or which produces the best agreement among competent
judges (reliability considerations). An alternative criterion for adjudicating among
assessment approaches is the extent to which students improve either as consu

mers of assessments arrived at by different methods, or through being trained to

use a particular assessment approach themselves. With respect to the teaching of
writing, these issues have not been thoroughly explored, although they are
touched upon by Cooper (1977), Odell and Cooper (1980) and several others.
While the line of development in this article is differentfrom that in the litera
ture on writing assessment, it shares an interest in learning outcomes which are
complex in the sense that qualitative judgments (defined below) are invariably
involved in appraising a student's performance. In such learnings, student devel
opment is multidimensional rather than sequential, and prerequisite learnings can
not be conceptualized as neatly packaged units of skills or knowledge. Growth
takes place on many interrelated frontsat once and is continuous rather than lock
step. The outcomes are not easily characterized as correct or incorrect, and it is
more appropriate to think in terms of the quality of a student's response or the
degree of expertise than in terms of facts memorized, concepts acquired or con
tent mastered.

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Qualitative judgments defined and characterized

A qualitative judgment is defined (Sadler, 1987) as one made directly by a person,

the person's brain being both the source and the instrument for the appraisal. Such
a judgment is not reducible to a formula which can be applied by a non-expert. In
general, qualitative judgments have some or all of the following five
characteristics:
1. Multiple criteria are used in appraising the quality of performances. As well as
the individual dimensions represented by the criteria, the total pattern of rela
tionships among those dimensions is important. In this sense the criteria inter
lock, so that the overall configuration amounts to more than the sum of its
parts. Decomposing a configuration tends to reduce the validity of an appraisal.
2. At least some of the criteria used in appraisal are fuzzy rather than sharp. A
sharp criterion contains an essential discontinuity which is identifiable as an
abrupt transition from one state to another, such as from correct to incorrect.
There may be two or more well-defined states, but it is always possible in prin
ciple to determine which state applies. Sharp criteria are involved in all objec
tive testing (including that in the arts and humanities), and the assessment of
many outcomes in mathematics and the sciences which involve problem solv
ing and theorem proving. By contrast, fuzzy criteria are characterized by a con
tinuous gradation from one state to another. Originality, as applied to an essay,
is an example of a fuzzy criterion because everything between wholly unorigi
nal and wholly original is possible. A fuzzy criterion is an abstract mental con
struct denoted by a linguistic term which has no absolute and unambiguous
meaning independent of its context. If a student is to be able to consciously use
a fuzzy criterion in making a judgment, it is necessary for the student to under
stand what the fuzzy criterion means, and what it implies for practice.
Therefore, learning these contextualized meanings and implications is itself an
important task for the student.
3. Of the large pool of potential criteria that could legitimately be brought to bear
for a class of assessments, only a relatively small subset are typically used at
any one time. The competent judge is able not only to make an appraisal, but
also to decide which criteria are relevant, and to substantiate a completed judg
ment by reference to them. In many cases, the teacher may find it impossible to
specify all of the relevant criteria in advance, or may find that a fixed set of cri
teria is not uniformly applicable to different student responses, even though
those responses may ostensibly be to the same task. Professional qualitative
judgment consists in knowing the rules for using (or occasionally breaking) the
rules. The criteria for using criteria are known as metacriteria.

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4. In assessing the quality of a student's response, there is often no independent

method of confirming, at the time when a judgment is made, whether the deci
sion or conclusion (as distinct from the student's response) is correct. Indeed, it
may be meaningless to speak of correctness at all. The final court of appeal is
to another qualitative judgment. To give an example of methodological inde
pendence, suppose that two essays are to be compared. One approach is to ask
a competent person to judge which is of higher quality, with or without speci
fying the criteria. A differentmethod of judging quality would be to use a com
puter program to analyse certain textual properties such as the frequency of
commas, and the proportions of prepositions, conjunctions and uncommon
words. These two methods are independent because they use essentially differ
ent means for arriving at a conclusion. But having two persons instead of just
one would not constitute independent methods, even if both persons were to

make the judgments without reference to each other, and in that sense work
independently.
5. If numbers (or marks, or scores) are used, they are assigned after the judgment
has been made, not the reverse. In making qualitative judgments, the final deci
sion is never arrived at by counting things, making physical measurements, or
compounding numbers and looking at the sheer magnitude of the result.

Complex learning outcomes of the type that are assessed by making direct qualita
tive judgments are common in a wide variety of subjects in secondary, vocational,
furtherand higher education. These subjects include English, foreign languages,
humanities, manual and practical arts, social sciences, and the visual and perform
ing arts. They are also important in industrial training and in many areas of
science and mathematics, particularly where students are required to devise exper
iments, formulate hypotheses or explanations, carry out open-ended field or labor

atory investigations, or engage in creative problem solving. Assignments and

tasks set in all of these areas involve students in actively synthesizing and inte
grating ideas, concepts, movements or skills to produce extended responses in
some form. In all assessments of such extended responses, qualitative judgments
are of fundamental importance.
Sometimes the student response or end product has a permanent form, an exis

tence separate from the learner. That is, it is an artefact which is open to leisurely
inspection. Examples include essays, musical compositions, welding jobs, and
articles of pottery. If the scaffolding used in the construction of the work is care
fully dismantled, the final product may retain no evidence of false starts, unfruit
ful paths followed in its production, or (if it has not been produced under time
constrained test conditions), the time taken to produce it. The product is, in fact,
infinitely malleable prior to its release, and the author can modify it by any
desired amount. A contrasting type of end "product" is when the learner's work is
transient, such as a live production performed by the learner in real time.

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Examples are a dramatic performance, a speech, an interview with a patient or

client, a classroom lesson, or a game of tennis. Note that making a recording of a

live performance produces only a secondary artefact which, while useful in analy
sis and review, is distinctively different in character from the performance itself,
and from, say, a carefully edited movie or record album produced over several
months. Artefactual and transient end products make different demands on the
instructional system in terms of evaluative feedback.
It is also useful to make a distinction among end products according to the
degree of design expected. In some fields of learning, the desired end product is
tightly specified (for example, by technical drawings) to the extent that if the con
structive abilities of all producers were perfect, the outcomes would be more or

less identical. What is assessed in these situations is essentially the learner's pro
ductive skill. Assessing such outcomes may or may not involve making qualita
tive judgments, depending on the number and nature of the criteria. In other fields
(such as writing), design itself is an integral component of the learning task,
although it may be so closely linked with production that is does not appear as a
distinct phase. In yet other fields (such as fashion and architecture), design itself
may be the primary consideration. Wherever the design aspect is present, qualita
tive judgments are necessary and quite divergent student responses could, in prin
ciple and without compromise, be judged to be of equivalent quality.

Communicating standards to students

Earlier in this article, it was argued that the transition from feedback to self
monitoring can occur only when three conditions are satisfied. The firstof these is
that the student comes to know what constitutes quality. In a teaching setting, this
presupposes that the teacher already possesses this knowledge, and that it must
somehow be shared with the student. In a particular context, however, it is often
difficult for teachers to describe exactly what they are looking (or hoping) for,
although they may have little difficulty in recognizing a fine performance when it
occurs among student responses. Teachers' conceptions of quality are typically
held, largely in unarticulated form, inside their heads as tacit knowledge. By defi
nition, experienced teachers carry with them a history of previous qualitative
judgments, and where teachers exchange student work among themselves or col
laborate in making assessments, the ability to make sound qualitative judgments
constitutes a form of guild knowledge.
While such in-the-head standards exhibit a degree of stability, they are not
immutable but can be shown to adapt to the circumstances. In particular, teachers
are often strongly influenced by the range of quality which exists among a set of
things to be appraised, and typically find it difficult to make an isolated judgment
of quality (that is, without reference to other students' work). Teachers tacitly

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acknowledge the difficulty of relying on memory alone when they make a survey
of pieces of student work before assigning grades to them. This survey generates a
loosely quantitative baseline or frame of reference for what is to be regarded as
barely satisfactory and what is to count as excellent in the context. Even after a

survey has been made, however, smaller scale order effects (especially severity,
leniency, and carryover) almost invariably occur. This is a subject of continuing
research (see, for example, the work of Hales and Tokar, 1975, and Daly and
Dickson-Markman, 1982) and can be interpreted in terms of Helson's (1959)
adaptation level theory. It therefore appears that teachers' conceptions of quality
and standards exist in some quiescent and pliable form until they are reconstituted
by fresh evaluative activity.
In an instructional system, an exclusive reliance on teachers' guild knowledge
works against the interests of the learner in two important ways. In the first place,

although the practice of surveying a sample of performances is common (and

advisable where the aim is fair ranking of one student's work against that of other
students), it is inappropriate for formative assessment because it legitimates the
notion of a standards baseline which is subject to existential determination.
Strictly speaking, all methods of grading which emphasize rankings or compari
sons among students are irrelevant for formative purposes. Assuming that sorting
and stratifying learners is not the main purpose of education and training, the
objective for each student is acquire expertise in some absolute sense, not merely
to surpass other students. Secondly, guild knowledge keeps the concept of the
standard relatively inaccessible to the learner, and tends to maintain the learner's
dependence on the teacher for judgments about the quality of performance. How
to draw the concept of excellence out of the heads of teachers, give it some exter
nal formulation, and make it available to the learner, is a nontrivial problem. It is
dealt with at some length elsewhere under the rubric of standards-referenced

assessment (Sadler, 1987). Some of that material is summarized below.

Two approaches to specifying standards are through descriptive statements and
exemplars. While neither of these is sufficient in itself, a combination of verbal
descriptions and associated exemplars provides a practical and efficient means of
externalizing a reference level. Descriptive statements set out the characteristic

properties of a performance at a designated level of quality. The following generic

description of high quality in a particular writing task is an example of a descrip
tive statement:

There is a logical progression of ideas from an original hypothesis to a final

conclusion. Facts are reported accurately, and the inferences drawn are plausi
ble. The author maintains some "distance" from the content, thereby achieving
a degree of objectivity. The whole piece hangs together well, the wording is
appropriate, and the mechanical aspects of writing are flawless.

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Descriptive statements may be used to specify anchor points on a quality con

tinuum, and may include specifics that are present/absent (such as a statement of
the hypothesis) or correct/incorrect(such as spelling and punctuation), along with
other features which are present to a greater or lesser degree (such as "hanging
together well"). They go part way towards externalizing standards, and may be
derived inductively by first classifying or grading student achievements
holistically, and then abstracting and codifying the distinguishing features of the
differentclasses.
Levels of quality or performance can also be conveyed in part by means of a
set of key examples or exemplars, chosen so as to illustrate what distinguishes
high quality from low. The advantage of exemplars for both teacher and learner is
that they are concrete. The minimum number necessary to convey a particular

reference level exclusively by exemplars can be shown theoretically to depend

upon the number of criteria to be used. The more criteria there are, the greater the
number of ways in which work of a given quality may be constructed.
Some teachers may be concerned that the use of exemplars as indicators of
standards would encourage students to slavishly copy the exemplars themselves,
and so stimulate convergent or stereotyped rather than original responses from
students. Students could become blinkered and have their creativity stifled. The
first counterargument to this view is that a single exemplar is inadequate to con
vey a standard anyway. Students need, in many educational contexts, to be pre
sented with several exemplars (for a single standard) precisely to learn that there
are different ways in which work of a particular quality can find expression. There

is often a wide variety of objects within the same genre which are regarded as
excellent. Unless students come to this understanding, and learn how to abstract

the qualities which run across cases with different surface features but which are

judged equivalent, they can hardly be said to appreciate the concept of quality at
all.
The second consideration is that originality and creativity are not usually, con
trary to some opinion, best developed in a completely freewheeling environment.
Bailin (1987) pointed out that there is no essential conflict between creative
processes and the production of something which is generally accepted as of high
quality. Creative productions are mostly highly disciplined, and are almost invari
ably produced not by accident or through random risk taking but when the
producer, by being thoroughly conversant with the characteristics of the discipline
or genre, understands when and how to transcend the normal boundaries.
Knowing the metacriteria, that is, knowing when the suspension of some criterion,
even on occasion a principal one, can be justified in favour of another, is an
important element in creativity. But to return to the issue of exemplars, it is the
experience of many teachers that even if some students do in fact copy, they may
learn something valuable in the process. Emulation is an ancient and still almost

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universal learning method. When students have gained whatever they can from, in
the worst case, slavish copying, there is time for the teacher to wean them away
from it.
Students develop a concept of a reference level more readily in some learning
contexts than in others. In the manual, visual and performing arts, for example,
students are usually able to observe, as a matter of course, the results of other stu
dents' efforts together with the teachers' appraisals of those efforts, simply
because the work is produced in workshops, studios, theatres and other open envi
ronments. The best examples, or perhaps exemplary material developed outside
the classroom, serve naturally and unobtrusively as reference points. In the liberal
arts and humanities, however, students often work privately, and do not get to see
or read what other students have produced. What constitutes work of high quality
then remains to some extent unknown. Exceptional cases aside, it is ironic that the
prototypes of competency levels which Myers (1980) recommended as necessary
for assessors using holistic methods for the evaluation of writing are not similarly
considered a general requirement for students learning to write or to master other
complex skills.

Standards as goals or aspirations

In its simplest form, a standard or reference level is a designated degree of perfor

mance or excellence. It becomes a goal when it is desired, aimed for, or aspired to.
Some goals are external (assigned by a teacher) while others are developed or
adapted by the learners themselves. A learner may decide to ignore or reject an
external goal, in which case it is likely to have little if any effect on achievement
except in a coercive situation. Only when a learner assumes ownership of a goal
can it play a significant part in the voluntary regulation of performance.
The effect of goals on performance has been the subject of a great deal of
research over recent decades. For a review of some of it, see Locke, Shaw, Saari,
and Latham (1981). In a wide variety of field and laboratory settings, it has been
found that what are called hard goals have the greatest impact on performance.
Hard goals are defined as being specific and clear rather than general or vague,
harder and challenging rather than simple or easy, and closer to the upper limit of
an individual's capacity to perform than to the current level of performance. Hard
goals act to focus attention, mobilize effort,and increase persistence at a task. By
contrast, do-one's-best goals often turn out to be not much more effective than no
goals at all.
The discussion above has more or less implied that a single standard operates
for a particular student at a particular stage of development. In general, of course,
the quality of work expected of a student rises steadily as the student progresses
through various years of schooling or the stages of a training program. If the rate

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at which expectations are raised is consistently greater than the rate of improve

ment, the inability of the student to keep pace results in little or no sense of
accomplishment even though improvement may actually be occurring. This in
turn may lead to a situation where successive attempts are taken less and less seri

ously, the performance gap widens progressively and becomes self-reinforcing,

and the student loses heart and effectively drops out. In some subjects, the rungs
of the ladder of achievement take the form of a gradation in both scope and com
plexity; in others, they reflect differentstandards on a well-defined quality dimen
sion. In classroom settings, students may need access to a range of standards (not
just the top rung) to cater for different abilities. (Whether this range corresponds
to the grade designations on an educational certificate is irrelevant).
It would be useful to research the optimum gap between an individual learner's
current status and the aspiration. If the learner perceives the gap as too large, the
goal may be regarded as unattainable. The same gap (in absolute terms) may,
however, provide a powerful stimulus for another highly motivated and confident
student, who would not be put off by a sequence of initial failures. Conversely, if
the gap is perceived as too small, closing it might be considered not worth any
additional effort.Initially, the teacher may find it useful to negotiate the aspiration
level with the student, or at least to take individual student characteristics into
account. The ultimate aim should be to have the student set, internalize and adopt
the goal, so that there is some determination to reach it.

Making multicriterion judgments

In addition to knowing about appropriate standards, students have to be able to

compare their actual levels of performance with these standards. This requires that
they be capable not only of making multicriterion judgments about their own
work but also of making them with a proper degree of objectivity and detachment.
To provide a background for the discussion in this section, consider the special
case of the assessment of written composition. This choice has been made
because of the substantial body of literature on the topic and because written work
is required in a wide variety of subjects.
At least 50 criteria have been identified for assessing the quality of written
composition. All of the criteria in the list below have been extracted from pub
lished sources, although an examination of teachers' written comments indicates
that even this list is not exhaustive. The criteria themselves are italicized, with
apparent synonyms placed together.

accuracy (of facts, evidence, explanations); audience (sense of); authenticity;

clarity; coherence; cohesion; completeness; compliance (with conventions of
the genre); comprehensiveness; conciseness (succinctness); consistency (inter

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nal); content (substance); craftsmanship; depth (of analysis, treatment); elabo

ration; engagement; exemplification (use of examples or illustrations); expres
sion; figures of speech; flair; flavour; flexibility; fluency (or smoothness);
focus; global (or overall) development; grammar; handwriting (legibility);
ideas; logical (or chronological) ordering (or control of ideas)', mechanics; nov
elty; objectivity (or subjectivity, as appropriate); organization; originality (crea
tivity,imaginativeness)', paragraphing; persuasiveness; presentation (including
layout); punctuation (including capitalization)', readability; referencing; regis
ter; relevance (to task or topic); rhetoric (or rhetorical effectiveness)', sentence
structure', spelling; style; support for assertions; syntax; tone; transition;

usage; vocabulary; voice; wording.

Several of these appear in a number of the most popular listings, of which
Diederich's (1974) is one of the best known. However, most of the others (even
those not commonly used by teachers in general) would be acknowledged as
relevant (at least for some genres of writing) by teachers of English. Some of the
criteria are fairly subtle. (What exactly is meant by flair?) Some are likely to be
used so infrequently that detailed explication is hardly justified. Some apply to
particulars (accuracy, support for assertions); others apply only to a work taken as
a whole (coherence, comprehensiveness). Some are sharp (certain aspects of
punctuation, for example); most are fuzzy. Some overlap conceptually with others

(rhetoric, style, persuasiveness); some apply to particular genres of writing but not
to others (referencing); and some logically subsume others (mechanics subsumes
spelling). Many are operationally correlated together, so that whenever an attempt
is made to change a piece of writing according to one dimension, other properties
are inevitably affected at the same time. For example, it may be impossible to
change the vocabulary of a piece of writing without simultaneously affecting the
tone. In short, this set of criteria is large and includes subsets which overlap and
interlock. It is therefore obvious that behind the customary published lists (usually
consisting of from seven to ten criteria) there lies a much larger set of potential
criteria that could be brought into play if and when the need arises. Given this
fact, and the complex interrelations which exist among the criteria, it is clear that
to use the whole set for a particular assessment would be unmanageable. How

judges cope with the situation therefore requires some investigation.

The literature on research into human judgmental processes in a variety of set
tings is both instructive and extensive, and cannot be adequately summarized
here. But of particular concern to researchers have been the inefficiency of
intuitive judgmental processes, and the limitations in human information process
ing capacities which result in biased or defective decisions (Sadler, 1981). In
broad terms, the many techniques proposed for making complex judgments fall
more or less into two camps, each of which has its research tradition, its advocates
and its detractors. Fortunately, it not necessary to make a firm decision on one or

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the other for purposes of formative assessment. Both can be drawn upon because

evaluative input can take any appropriate form, and in any case is always open to
discussion, clarification, and revision if necessary.
The first general line of attack is to devise and implement a procedure which
begins with identifying a number of relevant criteria, then measures the amount
present on each criterion and combines the various levels or estimates into an
overall measure of merit by means of a formula. The criteria are treated separ
ately, so that the order in which characteristics are considered is arbitrary and has
no effect on the final result. The combining formula may be simple, and require
only the addition of weighted or unweighted component scores or ratings. On the
other hand, the formula may be complicated (taking, for example, conjunctive or
disjunctive form). This so-called analytic approach is common in evaluating
consumer products. The global judgment is made by breaking down the
multicriterion judgment using separate criteria and then following explicit rules. If
necessary, the judgment can be justified by retracing and checking for integrityall
the steps that led to it. In assessing student work, the analytic approach typically
settles on the set of criteria considered to be most relevant to the work of most
students at a particular stage of development. The criteria may be simply selected
by a teacher on the basis of their logical relevance to the task, or may result from
empirical studies (using factor or regression analyses) of the judgmental behavi
ours of competent assessors. Diederich (1974) followed the latter approach. This
component-wise attack on the problem of making multicriterion judgments is
often advocated as the ideal towards which impressionistic, holistic or informal

systems should be made to move. It assumes, however, that the set of criteria
nominated is sufficient for all cases, that the criteria do not overlap, and that use
of the combining formula leads to judgments which would not conflict (except
perhaps rarely) with more holistic approaches. A substantial argument has been
mounted elsewhere (Sadler, 1985) that for complex phenomena, use of a fixed set
of criteria (and therefore the analytic approach) is potentially limiting.
The second approach to making complex judgments is for the evaluator to react
to the work as a whole, making an entire, or what Kaplan called a configurational
(1964, p. 211), assessment firstand then to substantiate it (to whatever extent is
necessary) by referring to separate criteria, which may or may not be drawn from
a prespecified set. In this approach, imperfectly differentiated criteria are com
pounded as a kind of gestalt and projected onto a single scale of quality, not by
means of a formal rule but through the integrative powers of the assessor's brain.
To produce a rationale for such a holistic or global judgment, the assessor
unpacks some of the conceptual unidimensionality. Configurational assessments
do not require the specification of all criteria in advance, neither do they assume
operational independence among the criteria.

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In making configurational judgments, competent judges select, from the large

pool of possible criteria, those which are salient to a particular appraisal. All of
the properties of a piece of student work which the teacher regards as normal,
ordinary, or expected (and which therefore do not call for either positive or
negative comment) naturally have low salience. Wittgenstein (1967, 1974)
pointed out something which is obvious once it is stated: what is ordinary does
not call attention to itself. "Does everything that we do not find conspicuous make
an impression of inconspicuousness? Does what is ordinary always make the
impression of ordinariness?" (Article 600). Something ordinary, therefore, is not
"remark"-able. Something out of the ordinary invites attention. High salience
implies that the amount of the property the object or performance possesses is dif
ferent from what is considered normal, and that an evaluation of the object would
typically mention this characteristic in its rationale.
Once a criterion has been identified in one or more evaluations, the judge's
sensitivity to that criterion is temporarily increased and it is more likely to be
attended to in subsequent evaluations. That is, the potential salience increases. In
the sense described above, the salience of a particular criterion is related to the
way the work being appraised is perceived. It is, therefore, a function of both the
condition of mind of the perceiver and the properties of the object being assessed.
Which of the potential criteria are singled out for mention has less to do with what
is detectable through the senses than with what is deemed to be worth noticing.
Consider, for example, the comments a teacher may make on a student's written

work, particularly those which are made progressively as the teacher (more or less
instantaneously) senses positive and negative points worthy of note. Some com
ments (such as "Yes", or "I agree!") are non-specific, or are not related directly to
the quality of the written piece. Other comments are evaluative, and clearly imply
criteria. It can be demonstrated that when a teacher, on two or more separate

occasions, makes running evaluative comments together with an overall

assessment of quality on a piece of student work, the overall judgments may be

identical but the running comments may differ from occasion to occasion. The
comments may be made at differentplaces in the writing, or if at the same point,
may differ in content. It also can be demonstrated that several assessors may agree
on an overall judgment, but for differentreasons.
This phenomenon has implications for formative assessment, because it raises
the question of whether students can be expected to make systematic progress
when teachers appear to operate probabilistically. The obvious solution is to
revert to the analytical approach and make it clear to students that certain nomi
nated criteria are what will be used in appraisal. Many teachers follow this prac
tice, distributing criteria sheets to their students either as part of the task
specifications or (less usefully if the criteria change from task to task) when
returning assessed papers. Teachers who use criterion sheets regularly, however,

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find that while such sheets are helpful, they may lead to frustration because of
their inflexibility. The qualities of a piece of work cannot necessarily be dealt
with adequately using a fixed criterion set, and teachers often feel the need to call
upon nonstandard criteria.
A more satisfactory (and less mechanistic) solution to the problem is to con
sider the universe of criteria as notionally partitioned into two subsets called for
convenience manifest and latent criteria (Sadler, 1983). Manifest criteria are those
which are consciously attended to either while a work is being produced or while
it is being assessed. Latent criteria are those in the background, triggered or acti
vated as occasion demands by some (existential) property of the work that devi
ates from expectation. Whenever there is a serious violation of a latent criterion,
the teacher invokes it, and it is added (at least temporarily) to the working set of
manifest criteria. This is possible because competent teachers have a thorough
knowledge of the full set of criteria, and the (unwritten) rules for using them. But
it is precisely this type of knowledge which must be developed within the students
if they are to be able to monitor their own performances with a reasonable degree
of sophistication. The translation of a criterion from latent to manifest should
therefore not be interpreted by either the student or the teacher as unfair or as
some sort of aberration. Because of the practical impossibility of employing all
criteria at once, it is inevitable and perfectly normal. Marshall (1958, 1968)
referred to this as theflotation principle, and advocated its use in evaluation. In an
interesting shift of metaphor, it also formed the basis for Elbow's (1973) so-called
center of gravity approach to appraising student writing for formative purposes.
The art of formative assessment is to generate an efficient and partly reversible

progression in which criteria are translated for the student's benefit from latent to
manifest and back to latent again. The aim is to work towards ultimate submer
gence of many of the routine criteria once they are so obviously taken for granted
that they need no longer be stated explicitly. The necessity to recycle work
through the teacher (for appraisal) can be reduced or eliminated only to the extent
that students develop a concept of quality, and the facility for making
multicriterion judgments. This in turn requires that they be given adequate
evaluative experience themselves.

Direct evaluative experience

When students have to rely solely on, say, teachers' writtencomments, not only is
the feedback conveyed in propositional form, but the number of comments and
their content depends upon the willingness of the teacher (and the time available)
to actually make the comments, the ability of the teacher to express the feedback
in words, and the ability of the student to interpret the comments. The student
may not, for instance, know what is implied by references to particular evaluative

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criteria. For example, suppose a teacher points out to a student that something
produced is not as coherent as it should be. As a criterion, coherence implies that
how something hangs together is important in appraising it. Coherence is clearly
relevant to evaluating a variety of things: a painting, an essay, a dramatic seg
ment, and so on. The nature of the elements that have to cohere (visual elements,
concepts and ideas, physical movements), the serial and lateral connections
between these elements, and the relation of each part to the whole, may not neces
sarily be clear to the student unless the contextual meaning of coherence is
explained. Exactly what coherence implies in one context does not transfer
directly to another context, although the basic idea is the same. Because much of
the evaluative knowledge underlying teachers' comments is tacit, the learner also
has a need to develop an appropriate body of tacit knowledge to be able to inter
pret formal statements.
Criteria often seem elusive partly because what a criterion means and what it
implies for appraisal cannot necessarily be defined in isolation from concrete
examples of things which possess the property in question, which in any case is
usually only one of many properties. Coming to an understanding of the property
is therefore as much an epistemological as it is a technical matter. To clarify the
meaning and implications of a particular criterion, it would be useful to have a set
of graded examples exhibiting more or less of that property. But for works of art
or pieces of literature, the various properties are inevitably compounded together,
so that one cannot create or collect examples for which all properties other than
the one in question are held constant. This is in contrast with a dichotomous
criterion such as correctness, for which positive and negative instances may
usually be produced on demand.
A novice is, by definition, unable to invoke the implicit criteria for making
refined judgments about quality. Knowledge of the criteria is "caught" through
experience, not defined. It is developed through an inductive process which
involves prolonged engagement in evaluative activity shared with and under the
tutelage of a person who is already something of a connoisseur. By so doing "the
apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are
not explicitly known to the master... Connoisseurship... can be communicated
only by example, not by precept" (Polanyi, 1962, p. 53-54). In other words,
providing guided but direct and authentic evaluative experience for students
enables them to develop their evaluative knowledge, thereby bringing them within
the guild of people who are able to determine quality using multiple criteria. It
also enables transferof some of the responsibility for making evaluative decisions
from teacher to learner. In this way, students are gradually exposed to the full set
of criteria and the rules for using them, and so build up a body of evaluative
knowledge. It also makes them aware of the difficulties which even teachers face
of making such assessments; they become insiders rather than consumers.

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For some types of learning, there is a furtherfundamental reason for deliber

ately developing tacit (as distinct from explicit or propositional) evaluative
knowledge through experience. Consider the case when the learner's work
consists of a live production such as a musical performance. If the performer
focuses too consciously on either the mechanics of production or the control of
production during the performance itself, the quality of the performance
frequently suffers. Occasionally the loss of quality is catastrophic. The performer
needs to control the performance using what Polanyi calls subsidiary awareness
(1962, p. 55) of the state of play at any instant. Subsidiary awareness draws
subconsciously on a body of tacit evaluative knowledge. By contrast, a focal
awareness may interfere with and be detrimental to the performance. Fortunately,
learning contexts in which live performances are common also provide, in most
cases, an abundance of illustrative performances and opportunities for appraisal.
Most of the discussion above is valid regardless of whether the criteria are
viewed as discrete or interlocked. If the criteria are considered separately, apprai
sals are concerned more with individual properties or qualities than with quality in
the broader sense. There are, however, two reasons for encouraging students to

make configurational judgments of overall quality as well, making use of a num

ber of criteria simultaneously. Firstly, students need to be able to appraise a work
as a whole in order to appreciate how different varieties within the one class or
genre (such as the short story) can be of comparable quality even though the basic
design or structural features are different. Separate consideration of the criteria
does not necessarily create the experience of how they may all be put together.
Part of the acquisition of creative expertise lies in learning about the permissible
limits to variation within the one class, and different classes are often distin
guished less by individual criteria than by characteristic configurations. The same
list of criteria may be used for assessing several classes, but the criteria may
require different interpretations, or differ in relative significance, from class to
class. The ability to make global appraisals is therefore fundamental to under
standing the nature of differentclasses, and hence to producing something within
a particular class.
Secondly, something may apparently meet requirements on all appropriate cri
teria taken individually yet be unsatisfactory overall. It may be difficult to explain
this anomaly to students, unless students themselves are confronted with the same
evaluative problem. In a different context, Tversky (1969) suggested a line of
argument which is perhaps helpful here. Suppose there exists some maximum def
icit that could be tolerated on a single criterion before it would be noticed that the
expectation had not been met. If on each one of a set of criteria the deficit is less
than the tolerable limit, and if there are a number such criteria, the global assess
ment actually fails the minimum-quality test by an amount equal to the sum of the
individual deficits. The global shortfall may be noticeable but not the individual

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shortfalls. The disqualification is then due less to a single identifiable cause than
to the combined effects of marginal deficits.

Evaluative experience and task specifications

The concept of guild knowledge can be extended beyond the confines of evaluat
ing a piece of work in isolation, to evaluating a piece of work in relation to the
task specifications. In situations where students construct assignments or term
papers according to specifications laid down by the teacher, it is common (and
frustratingfor the teacher) for a proportion of students not to address themselves
to the task set. The student, for example, may do a creditable job of recounting the
story of a novel instead of identifying the theme. Some teachers adopt a policy of
accepting and giving partial credit (deliberately or by default) for a response
which is well put together but is off-target.On the surface, this practice appears to
make a reasonable concession to the hardworking student for the time and effort
put in. In the long run, however, it undermines the learning which is supposed to
take place, and reduces the student's incentive to tackle tasks of the type actually
set. If learning how to address a set task or how to produce something within an
established genre is an important instructional outcome, sticking to the task has to
be a pre-emptive criterion. Meeting the generic requirement is a logical precondi
tion for an appraisal to be made within a particular genre, but the significance of
this fact may be brought home to the students only when they themselves are
faced with deciding whether or not several pieces of work meet the original task
specifications. In addition, it may demonstrate to them how common it is for
students not to respond to the task that is actually set
Some of the variation in quality of different students' responses to a set task

may also be due to deficiencies in task definition. An appraisal of quality is then

confounded by a factor which has nothing to do with the student. The specifica
tions may be vague, incomplete or ambiguous. Alternatively, they may be
technically adequate for the expert, but contain terms whose meanings and
implications are not understood by the student. A common task in teaching
English literature, for instance, requires the student to identify and describe the
theme of a novel. Any student who does not know what is meant by the theme of a
novel, and how the theme is distinguished from the story or the plot, cannot
address the task as it is set. If the theme of a novel had been included as part of
the syllabus for a previous year of schooling, the teacher might mistakenly
assume that all students know what a theme is, and that the matter does not
require explicit attention. Joint teacher-learner assessment is therefore useful in
testing the adequacy of task specifications and modifying them if necessary for
future use.

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Evaluative expertise as curriculum content

In the above discussion of evaluative experience and knowledge, evaluation as

curriculum content should be clearly distinguished from evaluation as an agent in
learning. Evaluation and critical thinking are important aspects of many subjects
and courses. It is common to find references to evaluation in syllabus statements,
lists of objectives, and course outlines (relating, for example, to literary or artistic
works, the significance of historical events or economic policies, or the impact of
pollutants on the environment). In such cases, the student is cast in the role of
assessor but the subject of the evaluation is external to both learner and teacher.
This contrasts with the instrumental use of evaluative knowledge discussed above,
in which the subject of the evaluation is work of the type or genre being produced
or performed by the students, (but is not, of course, limited to the student's own
work). Evaluative activity in the latter situation is inextricably connected with
constructive activity, and is primarily enabling and facilitative rather than an end
in itself.

Strategies for gap closure

In many contexts, students traditionally have more or less relied on their teachers
to tell them how to effect improvement. This aspect is not dealt with in detail
here, except to observe that if the teacher is to be in a position to suggest remedial
moves, the teacher should ideally possess current productive expertise of the kind
to be developed by the student. Apart from the issue of credibility with students, a
teacher should not be purely a connoisseur who never engages in any disciplined
way in productive activity. Many teachers of writing, for example, do not volun
tarily write prose or poetry for either pleasure or profit apart from personal letters
and other necessities. Their writing experience is vicarious and limited to the
classroom setting. It consists of launching students into writing tasks of various
kinds, and later helping them to improve their work. This anomalous situation
parallels the experience of many students, whose only exposure to evaluative and
editorial activity is as it is received from the teacher. It therefore is also vicarious.
The third condition for self-monitoring to occur is that students themselves be
able to select from a pool of appropriate moves or strategies to bring their own
performances closer to the goal. This requirement warrants separate consideration
because the ability to evaluate others' or one's own work is not necessarily
matched by the ability to produce. It is also consistent with the thesis that the pos
session of evaluative expertise is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for
improvement. A student in English, for example, may be able to recognize the
theme in a novel once it has been identified by another person, or be able to dis

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tinguish between the theme and other nominated characteristics of a novel but be
unable to engage in the abstract thought which is necessary to identify from
scratch the theme or themes in an unseen novel, or to structure a written response
appropriately. This ability to recognize and evaluate but not construct is not an

isolated phenomenon, nor is it limited to education. There are many domains of

human activity where people are expert at appraising existing objects, sometimes
in a highly sophisticated way, but are themselves incapable of producing objects
of the type in question. Art criticism is an example, as is anything involving con
noisseurship as such. An important task of teaching, of course, is to help students
develop various kinds of expertise, including those of production.
In many complex artificial systems, control is achieved by having a large
number of feedback loops consisting of sensors, comparators and effectors.
Typically, each corrective action is singular and tied deterministically to a particu
lar deficiency. This also occurs with particular aspects of creative activity, such as
spelling, punctuation, and the accuracy of facts in producing a composition. But
the more complex a task is, and the greater the divergence in outcomes which can
be regarded as acceptable, the more likely it is that a variety of ways can be
devised to alter the gap between actual and reference levels, and therefore the less
likely it is that information about the gap will by itself suggest a remedial action.
Moves have to be imported from outside, and choices made from a range of
options or possibilities available to the learner. Provided the learner appreciates
the nature of the task, experience in production, evaluation and remediation
provides a means of developing and maintaining a resource pool.
The complexity of multicriterion learning tasks suggests that if the student is
prepared to act upon a set of identified deficiencies with a view to improvement,
one list of weaknesses may be as formatively effective as another if the criteria
are highly intercorrelated. On the other hand, improvements made in some direc
tions may expose residual (or even precipitate new) shortcomings in other direc
tions. For these reasons it would be difficult if not impossible in the situations
described above to automate or develop a computer-based system for feedback or
formative assessment, or for generating remedial moves and appropriate
corrective procedures. Any attempt to mechanize such educational activities and
creative efforts is unlikely to be successful because of the large number of varia
bles involved, the intense relations often existing among them, and their essential
fuzziness (Sadler, 1982). But the inability to mechanize a system that ordinarily
depends heavily on qualitative judgments does not, of course, mean that such a
system cannot be made to work. People frequently not only make, share, and
broadly agree on qualitative judgments, but also use them as the basis for their
own improvement. By definition, something which can be shown to occur is more
than just a theoretical possibility, and it is common knowledge that a complex
activity can be subject to a high degree of control even when the individual
processes have not been comprehensively analyzed and are not fully understood.

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The most readily available material for students to work on for evaluative and

remedial experience is that of fellow students. Apart from availability, and

provided steps are taken to ensure that mutual exchange does not cause friction or
resentment or make weaker students feel threatened or humiliated, engaging in
evaluative and corrective activity on other students' work has the advantages that
(a) the work is of the same type and addressed to the same task as their own, (b)
students are brought face to face with a wide range of moves or solutions to crea
tive, design, and procedural problems, and exposure to these incidentally expands
their own repertoire of moves, (c) other students' attempts normally cover a wide
spectrum of imperfections, including global and particular inadequacies, and (d)
the use of other students' work in a cooperative environment assists in achieving
some objectivity in that students are less defensive of, and committed emotionally
to, other students' work than to their own. A practical spin-off of the use of peer
appraisal is that it reduces the assessment workload for teachers. That traditional
approaches to formative assessment are typically labour intensive partly explains
teachers' reluctance to do much of it.
Constructively appraising the work of fellow learners is already established as
part of normal teaching in some subjects and fields. Many teachers, for example,
encourage their students to exchange work with one another in class. In particular,
these principles are foundational to certain approaches to the teaching of writing,
specifically reader-writer conferencing, peer review, and process writing.
Students develop their pool of strategies by learning to revise and refine their own
work in cooperation with the teacher, and by editing and helping other students to

improve theirs (Beaven, 1977; Pianko and Radzik, 1980; Thompson, 1981;
Chater, 1984). "Students who become conscious of what they're doing by
explaining their decisions to other students also learn new strategies for solving
writing problems. And because students should become progressively more inde
pendent and self-confident as writers, they need to evaluate each other's work and
their own frequently, a practice which teaches constructive criticism, close read
ing, and rewriting" (Lindemann, 1982, p. 234). Boud (1986) reported similar find
ings in higher education when self-assessment and peer-assessment were built
into instructional procedures for law, engineering and architecture students. It is
clear that to build explicit provision for evaluative experience into an instructional
system enables learners to develop self-assessment skills and gap-closing
strategies simultaneously, and therefore to move towards self-monitoring. Some
resistance to this proposition can, however, be expected.

Factors militating against self-monitoring

The lack of opportunities typically given to students to make appropriate qualita

tive judgements suggests an underlying assumption that only teachers have the

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skill and expertise to evaluate student work, and that this skill is not transferable
to the students. Bloom's (1956) influential taxonomy places evaluation at the top
of the hierarchy of cognitive skills, and some learning theorists hold that learners
typically do not (and perhaps cannot) engage in high-level abstract thought while
young. Although the exact position of evaluation in the Bloom hierarchy is
debatable, it almost certainly requires abstract thinking and is situated above
knowledge, comprehension, and application. This may give the impression that
evaluation is some kind of esoteric activity engaged in only by adults or experts.
If so, it ignores the fact that even children (certainly in their hours out of school)
continually engage in evaluative activity and, if asked, can often produce
rudimentary but reasonably sound rationales for theirjudgments.
Some teachers feel threatened by the idea that students should engage openly
and cooperatively in making evaluative judgments. An assessment which results
in a grade is used by many teachers as a tool for the control or modification of
behaviour, for rewards and punishments. To remove some of the responsibility for
assessment from teachers and place it in the hands of students may be considered
to have the potential for undermining the teacher's authority. A less pathological
concern is that many teachers perceive evaluation as the responsibility primarily
of teachers because it constitutes part of the specialized knowledge and expertise
that they have acquired as professionals. Assessment is regarded as strictly the
teachers' prerogative: it sets them apart from their students and to some extent
from parents and the rest of society. Part of the teacher's responsibility is surely,
however, to download that evaluative knowledge so that students eventually
become independent of the teacher and intelligently engage in and monitor their
own development. If anything, the guild knowledge of teachers should consist
less in knowing how to evaluate student work and more in knowing ways to down
load evaluative knowledge to students.
Apart from personal factors, formative assessment can be inhibited by certain
circumstances outside the control of the teacher. School-based or internal exami
nation systems often make use of so-called continuous (or progressive, or peri
odic) assessment. One of the arguments in favour of continuous assessment is that
a series of assessments made over an extended period of time tends to reduce the
high levels of anxiety experienced by some students under formal make-or-break
examinations at the end of a course. (It may, of course, create a different form of
stress.) Another argument is that continuous assessment permits wider and more
varied sampling of a student's knowledge and skills. A third argument is that
continuous assessment provides frequent feedback on progress. Continuous
assessment cannot, however, function formatively when it is cumulative, that is,
when each attempt or piece of work submitted by a student is scored and the
scores are added together at the end of the course. This practice tends to produce
in students the mindset that if a piece of work does not contribute towards the

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142

total, it is not worth doing. The longer-term goal of excellence may therefore be
forfeited because of the drive to accumulate credit. Optional recycling of work for
purposes of improvement becomes an unattractive proposition, and also raises the
question of fairness to other students if a teacher works with some of the students
(but perhaps not others) in helping to raise the standard of performance. Any work
which is to form the basis for a course grade is normally expected, of course, to be
produced by the student without aid from the teacher.
A furtherfactor follows from the widespread policy of allocating course grades
according to some predetermined statistical distribution. This is often considered
to be the best or only practical method of maintaining standards. Such grading-on
the-curve, however, does not allow for the recognition of improvement in

performance in absolute terms; it creates a zero-sum game, encourages

competitiveness among students, and is inimical to the goal of genuine improve

ment for all students.

A final factor is associated with curriculum structure. There has been a trend
over recent decades towards breaking up long courses into units or modules in the

name of providing increased curriculum flexibility for students. Each unit is

designed so that it can to a substantial extent stand alone, and each is taught over
a single term or semester, or even a few weeks. Students compile a customized
curriculum by putting together a collection of units. For purposes of formative
assessment, the length of each unit is often not long enough for students to submit
work, have it assessed, rework it in an effort to become proficient, and finally
submit a different but well-produced piece for a grade. There is simply not the

time to do it.

Conclusion

To improve their performance, students need to know how they are progressing.
Feedback is commonly defined in terms of information given to the student about
the quality of performance (knowledge of results). But in many educational and
training contexts, students produce work which cannot be assessed simply as
correct or incorrect. The quality of the work is determined by direct qualitative
human judgment. The traditional definition of feedback is then too narrow to be
of much use, and in this article a more appropriate conception is presented. It
requires knowledge of the standard or goal, skills in making multicriterion
comparisons, and the development of ways and means for reducing the
discrepancy between what is produced and what is aimed for.
Improvement can, of course, occur if the teacher provides detailed remedial
advice and the student follows it through. This, however, maintains the learner's
dependence on the teacher. The alternative approach which is described and advo
cated in this article is for students to develop skills in evaluating the quality of

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 143

their own work, especially during the process of production. The transition from
teacher-supplied feedback to learner self-monitoring is not something that comes
about automatically. For an important class of learning outcomes, the instructional
system must make explicit provision for students themselves to acquire evaluative

expertise. It is argued that providing direct and authentic evaluative experience is

a necessary (instrumental) condition for the development of evaluative expertise
and therefore for intelligent self-monitoring. It is insufficient for students to rely
upon evaluative judgments made by the teacher.
The practices recommended are not radically new, and are already employed in
some instructional systems. Empirically, they are known to produce results. What
this article provides is a theoretical perspective on these practices, and an argu
ment for their generalization to any instructional system designed to produce lear

ner outcomes which are judged qualitatively using multiple criteria. The corollary
is that not to design authentic evaluative experience into the instructional system
either places an artificial performance ceiling on many students or limits their rate
of learning.

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