What is promoted by a formative assessment?

Formative assessment is designed to monitor student learning and provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to enhance their learning. This type of assessment is implemented during the learning process, allowing educators to make in-class adjustments based on real-time data about student understanding and performance.

Specifically, it promotes tailoring instruction to meet the diverse needs of individual students or groups as they progress toward established learning objectives. This dynamic approach facilitates a more responsive learning environment, acknowledging that students have differing levels of grasp on the content at various points in time.

The other options focus on aspects of assessment that do not align with the primary function of formative assessments. For instance, in-class changes to improve student engagement may be a byproduct of using formative assessments, but they do not directly represent what formative assessment promotes. End-of-year testing and assessments that focus solely on final outcomes are more characteristic of summative assessments, which evaluate student learning at the conclusion of an instructional period and do not provide the iterative feedback that formative assessments aim to deliver.