Formative assessment refers to a wide variety of methods that teachers use to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or course. Formative assessments help teachers identify concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning standards they have not yet achieved so that adjustments can be made to lessons, instructional techniques, and academic support.

Formative assessment can be a formal and/or informal assessment procedure employed by teachers during the learning process, (not at the end of a course). Effective formative assessment includes qualitative feedback (rather than scores or grades), which allows the student opportunities to remediate or fill in any gaps in their learning. It also provides helpful information (to the instructor) on the impact of instruction, and identifies opportunities for alteration of teaching methods to ensure the greatest student achievement. Here are a few attributes of formative assessment:

Formative assessments occur during the course, not at the end
Formative assessments are a form of two-way communication providing valuable information for both the student and instructor.
Formative assessments are considered part of the learning, they support learning during the process
Formative assessments can serve as practice for students
Formative assessments help instructors differentiate instruction and thus improve student achievement
Formative assessments can be done using individual, partner, small group, or whole class models.

Rick Stiggins (in Black & William, 2009), suggests "the student's role is to strive to understand what success looks like and to use each assessment to try to understand how to do better the next time."

The following pages will further explain the impact of formative assessment

Black, P. J., & Wiliam, D. (2009). Developing the theory of formative assessment. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 21(1), 5-31.