Rethinking Teachers’ Formative Assessment Practices Within Technology-Enhanced Classrooms

In this chapter, we deal with the role of digital technologies in reshaping teachers’ formative assessment (FA) practices. In particular, we present a model (the WHW-model) aimed at conceptualizing teachers’ FA practices supported by digital technologies. We adopt a socio-constructivist perspective on teaching and learning, which, in terms of assessment, moves from “assessment of learning” to “assessment for learning” and even to “assessment as learning.” In the first part of the chapter, we progressively introduce the three dimensions that constitute the WHW-model: (1) the FA areas, to metaphorically locate teachers’ practices within four main categories of FA practices (the Where of FA); (2) the functionalities through which digital technologies can support FA processes (the How of FA); (3) the phases of FA, to locate teachers’ practices within the temporal line of pre-paration, paration, meta-paration and post-paration of any teaching and learning process (the When of FA). The second part of the chapter is devoted to highlighting the potential of the WHW-model to support the study of the evolving role of the teacher in the development of FA practices in digital technology-enhanced classrooms, by presenting paradigmatic examples aimed at operationalizing the model.