Assessment for learning – its genealogy

IN the beginning there was only diagnostic and summative assessment. Diagnostic assessment was supposed to share power with summative assessment in the classroom but never really attained equality with it not because teachers did not want to give diagnostic assessment but because stakeholders (parents and state) are more interested with statistics and well-defined label of students’ level of learning as measures of return of investments.

One glorious day, the education community had a dream. It dreamt that in the teaching and learning process, the students have much to contribute especially in the what and in the how they will learn! Thus formative assessment was conceived and born. Formative assessment shifted the focus of assessment from simply a process for collecting information about the learner to it being an integral part of the teaching- learning process. But the education community discovered a bug in the formative assessment.  At the end of the day, it couldn’t tell whether there was really learning that occurred or not because the teacher did not have the data of students’ initial understanding.  Actually they do only that the collection of the data is not “scientific” enough for educators. Thus, diagnostic assessment was resurrected and assessment for learning, was born.