Formative assessment is a key pedagogical tool that allows teachers to make instructional assessments in real time for the improvement of student learning. It gives students the opportunity to provide evidence of their learning. Saudi science teachers rely mostly on end-of-unit summative assessment and not formative assessment, and the literature contains little research about Saudi teachers’ use of formative assessment in science classrooms. Seeking to address this absence in the literature and using a convenience sample of male Saudi high school science teacher interviewees, this study investigated male Saudi Arabian high school science teachers’ understanding of formative assessment, their attitudes toward the practice, and how they utilize formative assessment in their classrooms, if at all. The results showed that male Saudi Arabian teachers had little practice implementing the concept of formative assessment because they felt great pressure to use government-directed curriculum in their very large classrooms while negotiating time and content constraints. Beyond pedagogical and classroom constraints, the power and control structure of the Saudi education system offered additional interaction dimensions that teachers had to navigate as they sought to understand and address their students’ learning needs.

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