Title Designing Formative Assessment That Improves Teaching and Learning: What Can Be Learned from the Design Stories of Experienced Teachers? AbstractThis article reports on findings of a qualitative study that investigated the difficulties teachers encounter while designing formative assessment plans and the strategies experienced teachers use to avoid those pitfalls. The pitfalls were identified through an analysis of formative assessment plans that searched for potential threats to alignment, decision-driven data collection, and room for adjustment and improvement. The main pitfalls in the design process occurred when teachers did not explicitly and coherently link all elements of their formative assessment plan or when they did not plan to effectively use information about student learning to improve teaching and learning. Through interviews with experienced teachers, we identified seven design strategies they used to design formative assessment plans that were aligned, consisted of decision-driven data collection, and left room for adjustment and improvement. However, these experienced teachers still encountered difficulties in determining how to formulate the right decisions for decision-driven data collection and how to provide students with enough room for improvement. Lessons learned from the design strategies of these experienced teachers are incorporated in design steps for formative assessment plans all teachers can use. Description of the data included 1. 26 Anonymized formative assessment plans.The 26 formative assessment plans came from 15 subjects and all four schools, varying from five to eight plans per school. That variety makes it likely that this collection of plans can provide a representative sample of formative assessment plans designed based on the five design steps, so there was no need to gather more plans.

1. Anonymized Transcripts of six individual interviews with experienced teachers. Semi-structured teacher interviews were used to answer sub-question 2 and gain deep insight into the steps experienced teachers take to design their formative assessment plans. What did they do in addition to or differently from the five design steps, and how did this contribute to meeting the three quality criteria for formative assessment plans (sub-question 2)? In the interviews, teachers were asked about their design process. Each interview started with the question: “How did designing this formative assessment plan come about?” Possible follow-up questions were: (a) “What did you do?,” (b) “Which steps did you take in designing this plan?,” and (c) “What difficulties did you encounter in designing this plan, and how did you resolve them?” After the teachers explained their design process in their own words, the conversation turned to comparing the design steps to the design story the teacher had just shared. Where had the teacher followed the five design steps, and where did their process differ? For example, the teachers were asked about their choices in step 2 of the design process about when and why they had planned checkpoints, what they chose to do at each checkpoint to elicit information about student learning, and whether they had linked checkpoints together.