Wellness Checks vs. Autopsies

Stenhouse recently released a new book by Cris Tovani called So What Do They Really Know?  The subject matter of this resource: formative assessment.  As are most professional development books put out by Stenhouse, this one is currently available via their website to be perused in its entirety. 

If I was unsure about this book, all fears were allayed as a result of the opening quotation taken from Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black, two researchers who have written on the subject of formative assessment in the classroom:

We use the general term assessment to refer to all those activities undertaken by teachers--and by their students in assessing themselves--that provide information to be used as feedback to modify teaching and learning activities.  Such assessment becomes formative assessment when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching to meet student needs.

From the initial quotation, a strong link between assessment and feedback is forged.  However, it is the second sentence which I believe encapsulates the essence of formative assessment: it is not formative assessment unless is is then used to adapt instruction in some way; without informing instruction, is ceases to be formative assessment. 

Later in the chapter, Tovani uses a metaphor from health care to further illustrate the difference between summative and formative assessment.  Summative assessements are compared to an autopsy, which

might inform the medical profession, comfort a family member, or provide useful information to a crime investigator, but it doesn't do anything for the person who has died.  Like the autopsies, summative assessments can rank and categorize learners, give colleges a way to standardize how they admit prospective students and allow parents to brag about their genius child.  Unfortunately, they don't help students get smarter in the tested area. 

One reason Tovani makes this assertion is that often this data is not available until after students have completed the school year.  It is then too late to reteach content or clear up misunderstandings.  Though it can be helpful for the individual teacher to see how the class as a whole scored on a particular concept, it is rather worthless for the individual students.  Many just see what their overall score is and then throw it in the garbage.

Contrarily, Tovani argues formative assessments are compared to wellness checkups where

doctors tell patients where they are healthy.  They also give patients feedback in areas where they are not so healthy.  Good doctors take it a step further and give suggestions for how to improve the conditions that are interfering with the patients' overall health.

Doctors do this is to provide tools the tools for patients to improve their health and prevent complications in the future.  The focus is on improvement, not just maintenance. These doctors understand that a person's overall health is not just their cholesterol level or their blood pressure.  Instead, it is a composite of multiple measures like activity level, sleep quality, nutrition, resiliency, social connections, results from blood tests, etc.

So far, I am grateful that I started to read this book, and I look forward to much insight as I work my way through the rest of it.