Formative Assessment and Feedback Practices in Education
Summary
Formative assessment encompasses a range of pedagogical strategies designed to monitor student understanding and provide ongoing, actionable feedback to support learning. Unlike summative assessment, which evaluates learning at the end of an instructional unit, formative practices are iterative and diagnostic. They include informal techniques such as questioning, peer and self-assessment, use of rubrics and exemplars, and formalised digital tools that track performance in real time. Central to effective formative assessment is the notion of feedback as a dialogic process: learners must not only receive information about their work but also engage with it, reflect on their current understanding and adjust their strategies accordingly. Recent advances have highlighted the role of feedback literacy—learners’ capacity to interpret and use feedback—as critical for closing the gap between performance and goals. In parallel, developments in technology and artificial intelligence are enabling more personalised, immediate and bidirectional feedback channels, fostering agentic engagement and metacognitive awareness. Globally, educators are adopting blended and online approaches to integrate formative assessment across diverse contexts, emphasising equity, learner autonomy and the alignment of assessment with real-world skills.
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Formative Assessment and Feedback Practices in Education publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in formative assessment and feedback practices in education across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Formative assessment: An ongoing process of evaluating student learning to inform teaching and improve student outcomes through timely feedback.
Feedback literacy: The learner’s capability to understand, interpret and act upon feedback to close the gap between current and desired performance.
Metacognition: Awareness and regulation of one’s own thinking processes, including planning, monitoring and reflecting on learning.
Elaborated feedback: Detailed information that explains the nature of an error, provides the correct response and often suggests strategies for improvement.
Bidirectional feedback: A dialogic exchange in which learners and educators mutually generate, interpret and act upon feedback.
Automated feedback: Computer-generated responses to student input, typically enabled by algorithms or artificial intelligence, offering immediate guidance and assessment.
References
- Students’ feedback seeking behaviour in undegraduate education: A scoping review. Educational Research Review (2023).
- Computer-based performance feedback: Effects of error message complexity on cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational outcomes. Computers & Education (2023).
- A review of assessment for learning with artificial intelligence. Computers in Human Behavior Artificial Humans (2024).
- Developing a learning-centred framework for feedback literacy. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education (2019).
- Supporting Learners' Agentic Engagement With Feedback: A Systematic Review and a Taxonomy of Recipience Processes. Educational Psychologist (2016).
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