Formative Assessment, Feedback, and Self-Regulated Learning: Making Learning Visible, Equitable, and Sustainable

This is ChatGPT's summary of the slide deck that I used for my presentation at St Kentigern, New Zealand on September 13th, 2025, and shared via DropBox at https://bit.ly/DylanWiliamPowerpoints

The presentation from which this article is drawn brings together several major strands of contemporary educational research—formative assessment, feedback, self-regulated learning, metacognition, and motivation—into a unified account of how learning can be improved at scale. Its central claim is deceptively simple: improvement in learning depends less on what teachers do and more on how evidence about learning is used to guide decisions by teachers, students, and peers. Formative assessment, properly understood, is therefore not a technique but a way of thinking about teaching and learning.

A first theme concerns the nature of formative assessment itself. The presentation emphasises that formative assessment is a function, not a category of assessment. What makes an assessment formative is not its format, timing, or label, but the way the evidence it generates is used. If evidence about student learning is elicited and then acted upon—by adjusting teaching, supporting peer interaction, or helping students regulate their own learning—then the assessment is formative. If the evidence is not used, the assessment is not formative, regardless of intent. This shift from intention to use is critical, and it underpins the argument that there is no such thing as “a formative assessment,” only formative useof assessment.

The presentation situates formative assessment within several complementary perspectives. From an intuitive perspective, it draws on Ausubel’s well-known principle that the most important factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Teaching without assessing prior understanding is therefore necessarily inefficient. From a functional perspective, formative assessment operates over different timescales—minute-by-minute within lessons, across sequences of lessons, and over longer curricular cycles—each serving different purposes but all contributing to instructional responsiveness. From an equity perspective, formative assessment emerges as one of the most cost-effective and well-evidenced ways of improving outcomes for all learners, while also narrowing gaps between groups.

A second major theme is the distinction between learning and performance. Drawing on cognitive psychology, the presentation highlights that performance during or immediately after instruction is often a poor proxy for learning understood as durable, transferable change. Some instructional approaches improve short-term performance while undermining long-term retention; others depress immediate performance but enhance learning. This distinction has profound implications for assessment and feedback. If teachers rely too heavily on surface indicators of performance, they may be misled about what students have actually learned. Formative assessment, when used thoughtfully, helps bridge this gap by focusing attention on evidence that supports future learning rather than merely current performance.

Feedback occupies a central place in this account, but it is treated with unusual care. While feedback is often assumed to be inherently beneficial, the presentation reviews evidence showing that feedback can sometimes lower achievement. The crucial factor is not whether feedback is given, but what students do with it. Feedback is effective only when it provides information about the gap between current performance and desired goals, and when it supports action to close that gap. Grades alone, or grades combined with comments, often undermine this process by shifting students’ attention from learning to self-evaluation. By contrast, descriptive feedback that focuses on improvement, especially when framed as an expression of high expectations and trust in students’ capacity to meet them, can have powerful effects on achievement, engagement, and even longer-term outcomes such as discipline and persistence.

A third major theme is the role of learners themselves. Formative assessment is incomplete unless students are actively involved, both as resources for one another and as owners of their own learning. Peer assessment, structured collaboration, and the use of exemplars help students develop a shared conception of quality. Self-assessment and reflection help students monitor their progress and make informed adjustments to their strategies. These practices are not add-ons; they are central to developing self-regulated learners.

This emphasis on self-regulation leads naturally to the presentation’s treatment of metacognition. Metacognition—knowledge about one’s own thinking and the ability to regulate it—emerges as a critical mediator between teaching and learning. Effective self-regulated learning involves planning, monitoring, and evaluating one’s work, supported by metacognitive knowledge about tasks, strategies, and oneself as a learner. Importantly, the presentation rejects the idea that metacognition is a generic, easily transferable skill. Instead, it emphasises that metacognitive strategies are domain-specific and must be taught in close connection with subject content.

Motivation is addressed in a similarly nuanced way. Rather than treating motivation as a stable trait or a simple cause of achievement, the presentation draws on research suggesting that motivation is better understood as an emergent property of learning itself. Success breeds motivation more reliably than motivation breeds success. Beliefs about intelligence, effort, and the causes of success and failure shape how students respond to challenge, but interventions such as “growth mindset” matter most when they are embedded in environments that genuinely support learning, feedback, and challenge. In this sense, mindset is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Finally, the presentation brings these strands together in a coherent vision of teaching as a contingent, responsive process. Teaching is not linear delivery but adaptive decision-making, informed by evidence and oriented toward helping all students make progress. Formative assessment, feedback, self-regulation, and motivation are not separate initiatives but interlocking components of this process. When aligned, they offer a powerful framework for improving both excellence and equity in education.

In sum, the presentation argues that improving learning is less about adopting new tools or labels and more about changing how evidence is used in classrooms. Formative assessment, properly enacted, makes learning visible—not to judge it, but to improve it.