Is Formative Assessment Losing Its Meaning?
Sometimes the vocabulary we use as educators starts out with one meaning, but morphs over time into something entirely different. We speak, for example, of wanting a curriculum that is aligned , intending that our district and classroom content will be matched to state standards. This alignment would further mean that there would be congruence among the written, taught, and learned curriculum. Enter textbooks, supplemental materials, and software programs, now presented to schools with the promise that publishers’ series or products are aligned to states’ standards. The term “aligned” here becomes relative: In some cases, the correlation is tight and specific; in others, it may be loose to vague. Whatever the level of alignment, it now seems that everything purports to be aligned to everything else, and the term itself begins to lose value, if not meaning. Standards-based reform started out being about all students’ learning well, about pre-identified content and performance standards,
