 For both Scriven and Bloom, an assessment, whatever its other uses, is only formative if it is used to alter subsequent educational decisions.Subsequently, however, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam suggested this definition is too restrictive, since formative assessments may be used to provide evidence that the intended course of action was indeed appropriate.They propose that practice in a classroom is formative to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited.