A Critical Review of Research on Formative Assessment: The Limited Scientific Evidence of the Impact of Formative Assessment in Education

By Karee E. Dunn, Sean W. Mulvenon. 2009

676 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Education, Information Systems, Information Systems and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc4d6bbf79994b18c58229e7fddad036ffb2f540

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Á. Sicilia-Camacho
2. I. Clark
3. V. López-Pastor
4. Torulf Palm
5. C. Andersson
6. Gurnam Kaur Sidhu
7. Arie van der Ploeg
8. S. Miller

In Information Systems

1. I. Clark
2. Gurnam Kaur Sidhu
3. Chan Yuen Fook

In Information Systems and Management

1. Á. Sicilia-Camacho
2. I. Clark
3. V. López-Pastor
4. Torulf Palm
5. C. Andersson
6. Gurnam Kaur Sidhu
7. Arie van der Ploeg
8. S. Miller

Citations in the corpus

• Understanding Formative Assessment Insights from Learning Theory and Measurement Theory (2013, background): “However, caution should be exercised in making an uncritical endorsement of formative assess ment (Bennett, 2011; Dunn & Mulvenon, 2009; Kingston & Nash, 2012a; Shepard, 2005).”
• Formative and shared assessment in higher education. Lessons learned and challenges for the future (2017, background): “According to Dunn and Mulvenon (2009): Formative assessment’s status as an ethereal construct has further been perpetuated in the literature due to the lack of an agreed upon definition.”
• Authentic Assessment and Pedagogical Strategies in Higher Education (2010, methodology): “Besides that, research has conclusively demonstrated that the use of formative assessment facilitates improvement in instructional practices, identifies “gaps” in the curriculum and contributes to increased student performance (Dunn and Mulvenon, 2009).”
• The Impact of Indiana’s System of Interim Assessments on Mathematics and Reading Achievement (2013, background): “However, this level of impact is not undisputed (see Dunn & Mulvenon, 2009; Hattie & Timperley, 2007), and recent meta-analyses of formative assessments of various kinds at various levels also point to smaller effect sizes, in the .20 to .30 range (Kingston & Nash, 2011; Nyquist, 2003).”
• Reasons for teachers’ successful development of a formative assessment practice through professional development – a motivation perspective (2018, background): “…evidence for adapting teaching and learning activities to the students’ learning needs, but there is no agreed-upon definition of formative assessment in the research community (Baird et al., 2014; Bennett, 2011; Dunn & Mulvenon, 2009; Filsecker & Kerres, 2012; Good, 2011; Wiliam, 2011a).”
• Formative Assessment: Assessment Is for Self-regulated Learning (2012, background): “Such perspectives are understandable in political climates of scientific rationalism, where certain sections of the research community may quite correctly regard formative assessment as “ethereal” (Dunn and Mulvenon 2009) and “fuzzy” (Dorn 2010).”
• Formative Assessment: Policy, Perspectives and Practice. (2011, methodology): “Firstly, the term formative assessment is so flexible so as to render it meaningless in practice (Young & Kim, 2010; Bennett, 2011), consequently the definition of FA is “fuzzy” (Dorn, 2010) and “ethereal” (Dunn & Mulvenon, 2009).”