Formative assessment as a process: observing, reflecting on, and providing feedback on learning among Telesecundaria students.

Abstract

This article is the product of research whose objective is to understand and describe formative assessment. Human development is the most difficult to evaluate because it involves the continuous capacity to learn, evolve, and adapt, with change being its most distinctive characteristic. Therefore, assessment in the educational field—that is, conventional learning—becomes an even more complex activity, as it becomes challenging because students are in constant evolution. The goal is not to measure the knowledge students acquire, but rather to observe how they learn, how they change, and how they adapt over time. Within the framework of the challenges facing the New Mexican School (NEM), which include implementing a humanistic educational model that responds to the right to education by providing girls, boys, and adolescents with an excellent, inclusive, and equitable education that contributes to their learning and integral development, the objectives established, the methodologies carried out, and the use of the results must be congruent with the humanistic perspective that goes beyond quantitative grades and a punitive sense of the use of results, as well as putting evaluation at the service of students' education from an inclusive perspective, allowing the identification of students' individual needs and considering a wide diversity of social contexts. Formative assessment could play a decisive role in addressing challenges and raising academic performance, involving the collection of data on student performance in order to understand their achievements, identify areas of strength and opportunity; it can include a variety of methods, such as real-time feedback, regular formative assessments, classroom observations, and collaborative dialogue between teachers and students.