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Successful Examples of Formative Assessment Designs

Dynamic Pedagogy (DP), a multifaceted approach to teaching and learning that integrates the critical classroom processes of Assessment, Curriculum, and Instruction. Teachers constantly adapt to meet students’ changing needs and strengths on a particular task (Armour-Thomas, Gordon and colleagues, 2005). Based on the work of Vygotsky (1978), Feuerstein (1980), and Sternberg (1988).

Intelligent Tutoring Systems, a computer-based tutoring system that incorporates well developed and highly specific descriptions of thinking about specific school subjects (Anderson and colleagues, 1990). The intelligent tutor is able to diagnose errors and provide specific instruction in order to mediate the student through the learning task.

Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) uses continuous classroom assessment strategies to modify instructional practices as needed (Carpenter and colleagues, 1996). Underlying CGI is a coarse-grained model of student thinking that is easily accessible to and employed by teachers.

Facets DIAGNOSER is an instructional program based on models of learning termed facets of student thinking. This instructional strategy is predicated on the cognitive principle that students come to instruction with initial ideas and preconceptions that the teacher should identify and build upon (Hunt & Minstrell, 1996).

Assessment via epistemic games (Shaffer, 2006) is designed to give learners the rich experience of professional practice within a discipline. They serve to develop domain-specific expertise based on principles of collaborative learning, distributed expertise, and complex problem-solving.

Stealth assessments (Shute, 2008) are unnoticed or unobtrusive to the learner and employ inferential practices that would be too hard for humans (e.g., estimating values of evidence-based competencies across a network of skills) by utilizing automated scoring and machine-based reasoning techniques. Internet-embedded assessments that are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the learning environments of virtual worlds is an example.