This book aims to give teachers, school heads, and others leaders and trainers in teaching, ideas and advice about improving formative assessment in the classroom. The ideas and advice are based on two years of work in a project which involved the team of authors at King's College working in close collaboration with thirty-six teachers in schools in Medway and Oxfordshire. This work was itself inspired by a review of over two-hundred and fifty research studies worldwide which established hard evidence that development of formative assessment raises students' test scores. This evidence has been confirmed by significant improvements in the achievements of the students in the project classes.

After a brief review of the research background and of the project itself, successive chapters describe the specific practices which teachers have found fruitful and the underlying ideas about learning that these developments illustrate. Later chapters discuss the problems that teachers encountered in taking on the changes in their classroom role that the new practices required and give guidance for school managements and LEAs about promoting and supporting the changes.

The book is illustrated throughout with quotations from the writing of the teachers involved which describe in their own words how they turned the ideas from the King's staff into practical action in their schools.