Formative Assessment for Lifelong Learning, Effective Teaching, and Sustainable Development in Russia

Abstract

Although formative assessment in the context of sustainability is considered to be a universal tool to raise students’ achievements and it has been introduced into educational practice in many countries, most Russian teachers do not possess formative strategies among their assessment repertoires. What prevents adaptation of formative assessment in Russian educational System? Our two year study of 19 secondary schools of Tomsk region (Siberia, Russia) was guided by the socio-cultural perspectives of Vygotsky (1978), Lave and Wenger (1991), Torrance and Pryor (Br Educ Res J 26:615–631, 2001), Black and Wiliam (2006), Fishman and Golub (2007), Pinskaya (2012) and it addressed the question of formative assessment adaptation in the region. The results showed that formative assessment was strongly linked with a development of both teacher’s and learner’s identities; it changes teacher role through negotiating understandings of a teaching–learning task via quality criteria, construction of an apprenticeship model of learning with respect to a social learning-central context classroom ethos (regulation). The teachers who adapted formative assessment have moved away from a traditional system of marking towards methods that allowed them to track an individual student’s progress to their own learning goals all the way to tertiary level. Teachers and students elicited, interpreted, and used results of formative assessment for making decisions about their next steps in learning through life. In the Russian context, therefore, formative assessment could be defined more as a lifelong learning tool for personal and professional growth of teacher and learner, and it needs to be incorporated simultaneously in Russian secondary to tertiary educational levels.