Formative assessment refers to the ongoing process students and teachers engage in when they: 1. Focus on learning goals; Take stock of where current work is in relation to the goal; 3. Take action to move closer to the goal. The best formative assessment involves both students and teachers in a recursive process. It starts with the teacher, who models the process for the students. At first, the concept of what good work "looks like" belongs to the teacher. The teacher describes, explains, or demonstrates the concepts or skills to be taught, or assigns student investigations -- reading assigned material, locating and reading materials to answer a question, doing activities or experiments -- to put content into students' hands. For example, the teacher shares the aspects of a good descriptive paragraph and tells students how their work compares to the ideal. Gradually, students internalize the learning goals and become able to see the target themselves. They begin to be able to decide how close they are to it. A student's self-assessment process marks the transition to independent learning. When students monitor their own learning and make some of their own decisions about what they need to do next, they are using metacognitive skills. These are important skills in their own right. Learning how to learn -- that is, learning the metacognitive skills that will ultimately contribute to lifelong learning -- begins with specific acts of self-assessment. Students learn how to monitor their own performance first with respect to specific learning goals they understand; for example, they learn to check sentences for specific comma faults or to check math problems for specific errors. These specific acts of self-assessment during the formative assessment process are critical building blocks as well as strategies for achieving the immediate learning goals. Gradually, students begin to be able to monitor more and more aspects of their work at once. This process is the essence of learning -- the continuous process of assessing one's own mastery of content and skills, and discerning and pursuing next steps to move forward toward a goal. The goal may exist only as an objective in a teacher's lesson or unit plan at first, but as students focus on their work, see and monitor their progress, and understand both what they are learning and how they learn, they become full participants in formative assessment and true learners. - Introduction.