---
name: formative-assessment
description: Read this when a teaching request touches assessment, feedback, or checking understanding, and you need to know which of the eight Nurture skills applies. Use it when the request is broad ("help me plan this unit", "how do I know they've got it?"), spans several skills, or when the user asks about assessment for learning or responsive teaching generally. It routes to the right skill and carries the shared Dylan Wiliam framework the others assume.
---

# Formative assessment (Dylan Wiliam)

The router for this plugin. Read the routing table, go to the skill that does the
work. Come back here only for the shared framework.

## Routing

| The request | Skill |
|---|---|
| Comment on / mark / respond to student work; feedback or marking policy | `giving-feedback` |
| Build a quiz, test, task, item bank; check an assessment measures what it claims | `designing-assessments` |
| A mid-lesson question that decides whether to move on or reteach | `hinge-questions` |
| Learning intentions, success criteria, rubrics, exemplars | `success-criteria` |
| Questioning, all-student response, exit tickets, discussion | `eliciting-evidence` |
| Peer feedback, self-assessment, reflection prompts, student ownership | `peer-and-self-assessment` |
| Interpret a class set and decide what to teach next | `analysing-student-work` |

Spanning request ("plan this unit formatively")? Work the strategies in order —
goals, then evidence, then feedback, then peer and learner agency — invoking each
skill as you reach it. Don't try to do their work here.

## The framework the other skills assume

Formative assessment is not a kind of test. It is **evidence about learning being
elicited, interpreted and acted on to make better decisions about what to do next**
than would have been made without it (Black & Wiliam, 2009).

Wiliam's own caveat, worth repeating to sceptical teachers: "formative assessment"
is a badly chosen name because people hear "a test". He prefers **responsive
teaching**.

Three questions × three agents:

|              | Where the learner is going | Where they are now | How to get there |
|--------------|---------------------------|--------------------|------------------|
| **Teacher**  | Clarifying learning intentions and success criteria | Engineering discussions and tasks that elicit evidence | Providing feedback that moves learners forward |
| **Peer**     | ← Understanding intentions and criteria → | ← Learners as instructional resources for one another → | |
| **Learner**  | | ← Learners as owners of their own learning → | |

Collapsed: the **five key strategies**. One big idea underneath — *use evidence of
learning to adapt teaching to meet learner needs*.

Most classrooms are strong on the teacher row and weak on the other two. When
diagnosing a practice, check the rows before the columns.

## What good output looks like, across every skill

1. **Evidence changes a decision.** If nothing would be done differently depending
   on the result, it isn't formative — say so and cut it.
2. **The learner has something specific to do**, and time allocated to do it.
3. **Wrong answers are diagnostic** — they say *which* wrong idea is held.
4. **The learning is named, not the activity.**
5. **Everyone is sampled, not the volunteers.**
6. **Claims are made at the strength the evidence supports** — including out loud,
   to the teacher, when it's weaker than they'd like.

## Recommend one thing

Wiliam's practical counsel is that a teacher should adopt one or two techniques
and run them for a term, not adopt fifteen. When someone asks "what should I
change?", answer with **one** change and say why that one. A list of twelve
techniques reads as thorough and produces nothing.

## Ask before assuming

You will usually be missing something only the teacher has. Ask for it rather than
inventing it:

- What are the success criteria, and have the learners seen them?
- What's the age group, subject, and curriculum or specification?
- What decision is this for — and what would you do differently either way?
- What have you already tried?

If the teacher is mid-flow, take your best guess, **state the assumption in one
line**, and carry on. Don't block on a question you can reasonably answer yourself.

## Real learner work beats invented examples

If a Nurture MCP server is connected, it can reach classes, assignments,
submissions and reflections; the Nurture Signal server reaches live-session
reactions, comments, questions and analytics. Discover the tools actually
available rather than assuming names — they change.

Pull the real work before advising. Then:

- Never name a learner in anything a class will see. Aggregate or anonymise.
- Say what the data can't tell you. Engagement reactions measure self-reported
  energy, not understanding — never report them as evidence of learning.
- If nothing is connected, say so once and work from the teacher's description.
  Never fabricate class statistics.

## References

- `references/five-strategies.md` — each strategy expanded, with its techniques.
- `references/evidence-base.md` — the studies, what they found, and where the
  common overclaims are. Read before citing a number.