Dive Brief:

• Many educators say formative assessments are one-time evaluations, not ongoing and fluid progress checks. 
• Despite this, "...few disagree about its central characteristic: its power to yield information about what students are learning while they're learning it," says Education Week. 
• Consensus exists that coming up with definitions and a common formula for the organic procedure might help students and teachers.

Dive Insight:

By using formative assessments, classrooms gain an additional level of understanding, experts say. Yet because no definition exists, teachers' concepts of what these assessments actually are vary wildly. Education Week reports that one thing is clear: they should be helpful to teachers as well as students. 

"I really do think that most teachers understand formative assessment to be something that takes place during the process of instruction and is immediately used to inform subsequent instruction," said Joan Herman, senior research scientist at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, & Student Testing at the UCLA.