Assessment for Good
Assessment for Good (AFG) is committed to creating asset-based formative assessments and interventions that are culturally affirming of Black and Latinx learners and honor each learner’s academic, emotional, and social development.
What We Believe
We are a community of researchers, educators, and developers who believe that if we can understand who learners are, at any given day or moment—including how safe they feel, their self-efficacy, their feelings of connectedness and belonging plus what they are learning—then we can create more supportive and successful learning experiences for and with them. We are more convinced than ever that the reimagination of formative assessment is the most powerful lever we can pull, and the AFG community has been working hard to build that system alongside learners, their caregivers, and their educators.
What is formative assessment?
Formative assessment is a process used during teaching and learning that reveals what a student knows and the helpful processes that contribute to that learning journey. Learners and educators actively partner to uncover and respond to the learner’s assets and new areas of discovery that support academic, emotional, and social wellbeing.
Adapted from NWEA (Northwest Evaluation Association) and FAST SCASS (Formative Assessment for Students and Teachers (FAST) State Collaborative on Assessment and Student Standards SCASS)
Why do we want to transform how learners experience assessment?
Within assessment we cannot assume that there is a common set of experiences students have, that they experience them the same way, and that students are going to reach a benchmark at about the same time as each other. It’s not effective for decisions to be made upon how far students are away from that normative path. At AFG, we want to create tools that allow us to understand that person’s path, because in reality we know there is no “norm.” We create tools that capture a student’s experience, and share that information back to the learner, their educator, or the family at the speed of teaching.