Lee Jones is president of Riverside Publishing, which publishes the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills^®. Riverside Publishing is a Houghton Mifflin Company.

Although viewed by some as an unnecessary evil and by others as a valued source of information, assessments undeniably play a prominent role in our education system. Students take end-of-year state tests, national norm-referenced tests, placement tests, AP exams, tests for college admission—so many that they and their parents and teachers often cry out in protest of what is viewed as overtesting.

So when I tell you I am about to relate the virtues of a relatively new type of assessment program that is being implemented by increasing numbers of schools across the country, you have a right to be skeptical and ask, "What? More testing?" But these new assessments, often referred to as formative assessments, can provide the very positive impacts on instruction and student learning that proponents of assessments have long envisioned. To understand how this has come about, it helps to review briefly the recent evolution of assessment in American education.

Educators have valued standardized "norm-referenced" tests, such as the highly respected Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, for decades as a measure of student and school achievement relative to national performance. These tests allow school leaders to understand how their students are achieving compared to their peers across the nation in a wide range of content and skill areas.

States establish goals
In the 1980s and 1990s, with increasing national and local emphasis on improving education for all students, many states established standards for student achievement along with "criterion-referenced" state testing programs. These programs allowed school leaders to understand how well their students are achieving relative to state-established performance standards. Schools quickly became accountable to states for ensuring that increasing numbers of students were achieving these high standards.

In 2002, the enactment of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation firmly established state assessment programs as tools for accountability. Under No Child Left Behind, states, districts, and schools now face repercussions—the withholding of federal funds, the transfer of students to higher-performing schools, the state control of the low-performing schools—if the achievement of all subgroups of students does not meet the high standards mandated by No Child Left Behind. With the stakes on these tests now greater than ever, school leaders face intense pressures to ensure that all students perform well and that their schools show significant improvement each year.

Facing these pressures and seeking effective means for improving student achievement in short order, schools are turning to new formative assessment programs. Formative assessments are relatively short assessments, integrated with classroom instruction and administered periodically throughout the school year—as frequently as weekly, or more typically, bimonthly.

Encouraging learning
The near-immediate analysis of formative assessment results provides a diagnosis of students' strengths and weaknesses relative to performance benchmarks that students are expected to achieve at particular points in the school year. This information, in turn, is used to adapt instruction to focus on the specific areas where student improvement is needed. With formative assessment, educators can understand, on any given day, how well their students are mastering a certain skill or concept, and can almost immediately target instruction to where it is needed most.

Research shows that the wise, systematic use of high-quality formative assessments has a greater effect on improving test scores than nearly any other educational intervention, and that the use of formative assessments to guide instruction is especially effective for improving the performance of low-achieving students. Many educators have advocated the use of formative assessments in classrooms to improve student learning, but it is only with the high stakes placed on state testing by No Child Left Behind that formative assessments appear to be taking hold in schools nationwide.

So whether you support No Child Left Behind or not, the establishment of formative assessments as a strategy for improving scores on state tests results in a benefit that everyone can support—more students will learn and learn more.

Reprinted with permission from the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Copyright © 2005. All rights reserved. Originally published March 1, 2005.