Formative Classroom Assessment and Benjamin S. Bloom: Theory, Research, and Implications

Although much recent attention has focused on gaps in the achievement of different groups of students, the problem has been with us for decades. This paper presents the problem as one of reducing variation in students’ achievement, and reviews the work of renowned educator Benjamin Bloom on this problem. Bloom argued that to reduce variation in students’ achievement and to have all students learn well, we must increase variation in instructional approaches and learning time. The key element in this effort was well constructed, formative classroom assessments. Bloom outlined a specific strategy for using formative classroom assessments to guide teachers in differentiating their instruction and labeled it “mastery learning.” This paper describes Bloom’s work, presents the essential elements of mastery learning, explains common misinterpretations, and describes the results of research on its effects. Formative Classroom Assessment and Benjamin S. Bloom: Theory, Research, and Implications Achievement gaps among different groups of students have concerned government and educational leaders for many years. In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” focused directly on inequalities in the educational achievement of economically disadvantaged students and their more advantaged counterparts. The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964, which established the Head Start program, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, which created the Title I and Follow Through programs, were specific attempts to address these gaps in educational attainment. More recently, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation (U.S. Congress, 2001) revived these concerns. The law requires schools to report achievement results separately for various poverty, ethnicity, language, and disability subgroups. Not only must schools identify any achievement gaps among these different student subgroups, they also must take specific steps to close them. Over the years educational researchers have learned a lot about reducing these achievement disparities. Yet because of our tendency in education today to focus only on “what’s new,” a lot of that important knowledge is being neglected. Instead of building on what we already know, many modern proposals for closing achievement gaps simply rename wellestablished principles, adding to the tangled thicket of terminology that confounds progress in education. To succeed in our efforts to close achievement gaps and to reach our goal of helping all students learn well, we need instead to recognize and extend this hard-earned knowledge base. Researchers’ Views Researchers do their best to view problems in their simplest and most basic form. From a researcher’s perspective, therefore, achievement gaps are simply matters of “variation”: students vary in their levels of achievement. Some students learn excellently in school and reach high