Formative Assessment

Assessment within tiered instruction is formative which means that practitioners gather information on children’s behavior and skills to inform instructional decisions. In addition to directly assessing children’s learning and development, teachers can use other forms of assessment such as observations and work sampling to make instructional decisions.  It is critical that teachers collaborate with families, specialists, and others to plan and organize targeted interventions and to assess how well children respond to them.

Formative assessments help you determine whether all children in your classroom are making progress, whether some children need additional behavioral or instructional supports, and whether children who receive these interventions respond well to them or need additional supports.

Types of Formative Assessment

There are two main types of formative assessment that are used within tiered instruction: universal screening and progress monitoring.

Universal screening involves gathering information periodically on all children in a classroom to monitor their development and learning, and to determine whether some children might need additional interventions to acquire key skills in academic learning or behavior regulation.

Progress monitoring is designed to gather additional information only on the children who receive targeted interventions to determine children’s responsiveness to these interventions.

For additional information about creating an assessment plan, see: Assessment of Child Progress: A Guide to the NAEYC Program Standard and Related Accreditation Criteria. (NAEYC, 2008).