Activating students as instructional resources for one another
In the process of formative assessment, students collaborate with each other to improve learning through peer-assessment. Teachers guide students to become helpful assessors of their peers through modeling and role-play. From simple beginnings like "I am not sure what this means .., I didn't understand your point about..," or "I would like to know more about...," student skills in feedback can be developed to provide more detailed analyses of a peer's performance and suggestions for improvement. For example, in a series of art lessons students are developing portraits in the style of Picasso from the visual information they have collected about his work using a variety of media. Students provide each other feedback about how they have used the forms, shapes, and colors from their visual information in the portrait and how they could consider developing the portraits further. Just as in self-assessment, the learning goals and success criteria need to be clear so that the feedback the students provide can be focused specifically on the criteria.