Formative Assessment in Educational Research Published at the Beginning of the New Millennium: Bibliometric Analysis

Today, many educational reforms emphasize the importance of formative assessment (FA) for effectiveness in teaching. Considering the importance of FA in education and a perceived lack of same, it is clear that much more research is needed on this subject. However, it is also very important for researchers to formulate new studies and not to repeat exiting ones, and to increase the visibility of exiting effective studies that can make teachers in service understand the importance of FA. In this context, being able to review qualified academic research is very valuable. Therefore, we aimed to conduct a bibliometric analysis using the VOSviewer to determine the focus of research on formative assessment in education (FAE). This bibliometric analysis included 447 studies on FA published in the Web of Science (WoS) from 2000 to 2021. We performed the citation analysis, created a co-authored network map, and performed an analysis of author keywords in FA publications. Results showed that Erin M. Furtak has been the most prolific author in FAE in terms of the number of publications. Moreover, David J. Nicol and Debra Macfarlane-Dick, who had a co-authored publication, were the most influential authors in terms of citations. Results indicated that Univ Colorado/USA with 13 publications was the most productive institution. However, the USA and England were the most productive countries in terms of both numbers of publications and citations. Of the 19 documents with over a hundred citations, Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick ( 2006 ) and Black and Wiliam ( 2009 ) were the most influential documents. According to the number of publications and citations, “Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education” and “Computers & Education” came to the fore among the top five most productive sources. The results of the co-occurrence analysis showed that the terms “assessment,” “mathematics,” and “professional development” were most often co-occurrence. Moreover, FA, which was the focus of this bibliometric analysis, had a high degree of co-occurrence with feedback, followed by summative evaluation, self-regulation, and professional development. These results will contribute significantly to the efforts of the scientific community towards FA research.