There’s a war of sorts going on within the normally staid assessment industry, and it’s a war over the definition of a type of assessment that many educators understand in only the sketchiest fashion.

Corrected: An earlier version of this study incorrectly described the 1998 study by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam. It is a literature review. If you ask five teachers what formative assessment is, ...

There are countless ways to assess students. Speaking broadly, two key assessment categories are “summative” and “formative”. Summative assessment, often the most popular one, aims to measure how much ...