More than half a century ago, Ausubel (1968) proposed that the most important determinant of learning is the learner’s prior knowledge, which should be identified by teachers and used to guide instruction.
Although this proposition may appear straightforward, it challenges the assumption that students necessarily learn what they are taught. Even when instruction is carefully designed, effectively delivered, and engaging, learning outcomes often diverge from intended objectives.
Indeed, even when learners begin instruction at a similar starting point, variations in understanding emerge rapidly, making divergence in learning outcomes almost inevitable. In this sense, assessment constitutes a central component of effective instruction.
Through assessment, it becomes possible to determine whether a sequence of instructional activities has resulted in the desired learning outcomes. Traditionally, the term “assessment” has been associated primarily with the evaluation of instructional effectiveness after teaching sequences have been completed. Processes that support learning during instruction were not commonly conceptualised as assessment. In French-language literature, such processes were typically described in terms of the regulation of learning, whereas in English-language scholarship they were often treated as an aspect of effective teaching rather than as assessment itself.
Recently, there has been growing recognition that activities designed to guide learning during instruction should also be conceptualised as forms of assessment. This shift has contributed to the development of the concepts of “assessment for learning” and “formative assessment,” which seek to capture the role of assessment in shaping ongoing learning processes. Historically, educational practice was often grounded in the assumption that well-designed instruction would be sufficient for most learners, with those who failed either receiving remedial support or being attributed individual limitations. However, beginning in the 1960s, Bloom and colleagues at the University of Chicago challenged this perspective, arguing that the normal distribution of achievement was not an inevitable outcome of ability, but rather reflected instructional systems that failed to account for learner differences (Wiliam, 2011).
Several studies provide strong evidence that innovations aimed at enhancing the frequency and quality of feedback students receive about their learning lead to significant improvements in academic achievement. These approaches consider students’ perceptions and emphasize their active role in self-assessment, alongside analyses of instructional strategies employed by teachers and formative practices embedded within systemic frameworks such as mastery learning. One of the outstanding features of studies of assessment in recent years has been the shift in focus toward greater interest in the interactions between assessment and classroom learning, and away from concentration on the properties of restricted forms of tests that are only weakly linked to the learning experiences of students.
This shift has been coupled with many expressions of hope that improvement in classroom assessment will make a strong contribution to the improvement of learning. Yet, the term formative assessment does not have a tightly defined and widely accepted meaning; it is interpreted as encompassing all those activities undertaken by teachers and/or by their students that provide information to be used as feedback to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged (Black & Wiliam, 1998).
To summarise, assessment has traditionally been closely associated with end-of-instruction examinations that are largely separated from the learning process itself. From this perspective, the primary function of assessment is summative: to determine whether learners have acquired sufficient knowledge and skills. In contrast, assessment for learning positions assessment as an integral component of instruction. It is designed to be information-rich and formative, guiding and enhancing each learner’s development according to their individual potential (Schuwirth & Van der Vleuten, 2011).
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