Assessment is practiced everyday in all social interactions. It is the way we naturally, even automatically, assess each other as we socialize in a variety of situations everyday: “Whenever we take the time to look and notice, we find naturally occurring, unremarkable, and unremarked assessment activities that nevertheless are fundamental in making human collaboration possible…[]…in-a-glance, on-the-fly mutual assessments underlie all of human sociality, and in fact, the sociality of all social species” (Jordan and Putz 2004, p. 348). This on-the-fly assessment has come to be known as interactive (Bell and Cowie 2001) or informal assessment (Shavelson et al. 2003) in education, or inherent assessment in noneducation organizations (Jordan and Putz 2004). These terms have been used as differentiators from those at the other end of the continuum, i.e., more planned or formal assessment as applied in education (Bell and Cowie 2001; Shavelson et al. 2003; Wiliam and Black 1996) and documentary...
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Ruiz-Primo, M.A. (2017). Informal Assessment. In: Peters, M.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-588-4_390
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