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Teaching excellence & educational innovation, what is the difference between formative and summative assessment, formative assessment.

The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments:

  • help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work
  • help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately

Formative assessments are generally low stakes , which means that they have low or no point value. Examples of formative assessments include asking students to:

  • draw a concept map in class to represent their understanding of a topic
  • submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a lecture
  • turn in a research proposal for early feedback

Summative assessment

The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.

Summative assessments are often high stakes , which means that they have a high point value. Examples of summative assessments include:

  • a midterm exam
  • a final project
  • a senior recital

Information from summative assessments can be used formatively when students or faculty use it to guide their efforts and activities in subsequent courses.

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Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

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December 22nd, 2021 | 8 min. read

Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

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Whether you’re an administrator, supervisor, or teacher, you’ve heard of formative assessments and summative assessments . They're both essential parts of any curriculum map . But what do these terms actually mean?

In a nutshell, formative assessments are quizzes and tests that evaluate how someone is learning material throughout a course .

Summative assessments are quizzes and tests that evaluate how much someone has learned throughout a course .

In the classroom, that means formative assessments take place during a course, while summative assessments are the final evaluations at the course’s end. 

That's the simple answer, but there's actually a lot more that makes formative and summative assessments different. To fully understand formative vs. summative assessments, you'll need to understand the details of these two important forms of assessment.

In this article, we'll take a closer look at formative and summative quizzing and assessing. When you've finished reading, you'll understand how to better test student knowledge in your classroom.

Video: Formative vs. Summative Assessments

formative vs summative

What Are Formative Assessments?

what-are-formative-assessments

Formative assessments are evaluations of someone’s learning progress in a classroom.

Common formative assessments include:

  • Presentations
  • Group activities

Formative assessments work great when they’re used on a regular basis. That regularity could be based on a calendar (every Monday, every Thursday, etc.) or your lesson plans (every unit).

They’re also more flexible than summative assessments. You don’t always have to use pencil and paper to get a feel for your students’ progress. Instead, you can use in-class games, group presentations, and hands-on activities to evaluate student progress.

Ultimately, the formative assessments you use are up to you. After all, no one knows your classes better than you. So if you’d prefer to get an overview of how well your students are learning, you can use a group-style assessment like a game. If you want to know where each student struggles, you can use an individual assessment like a quiz.

This flexibility is perfect for keeping students engaged in your class. It lets you stick to a syllabus while mixing up the exact task each student has to perform. That way, you don’t fall into a predictable routine of teach-test-teach-test. Instead, you have a varied routine of teach-game-quiz-teach-presentation-project or another interesting format.

By the time your course ends, you’ll have a full understanding of how students are learning as you teach a subject. Then, you can keep all of your grades to look for patterns among different class sections.

Is there an area where students seem to do worse than others? Could you adjust a lesson and shoot for better results?

Naturally, you’ll never get a class that’s straight A’s from top to bottom. But you can still design your classroom assessments to work for as many students as possible!

Top 3 Formative Assessment Examples

formative-assessments-examples

Formative assessments are excellent opportunities to let your students flex their creative muscles.

Even if a student isn’t much of a writer or artist, they can still have a little fun with these assessments.

1. Make an ad

Have your students create an advertisement for a concept they just learned. Use visuals and text to really sell an idea.

This makes students apply what they’ve learned into a creative exercise, which helps with long-term retention.

2. Idea comparisons

Instruct students to lay out the main ideas of a new concept they learned. Then, have them compare that concept to another to see where they agree and disagree.

In addition to helping students remember these concepts, this exercise makes them apply previous knowledge to a new format so they can remember it better in the future.

3. Misconceptions

After you introduce a concept to students, introduce a popular misconception about it. Have students discuss why the misconception is false and where it may have started.

This exercise makes students think critically about what they’ve just learned while showing them how to debunk misinformation.  

How Do You Track Formative Assessments?

You can track formative assessments in one of three ways.

First, you can track them by grade . This gives you a specific, concentrated view of how a student (or group of students) learns. However, graded assessments are sources of stress for many students. So if you want to make a unit fun or loose, graded assessments may not work well for you. 

Second, you can track them by feel . This is more based on your teacher instinct, allowing you to pick which students need additional support based on your observation. On the downside, you can’t “show” this information to your administrators . If you have certain standards to meet throughout a marking period, you won’t be able to prove you’ve fulfilled those standards without grades.

Finally, you can track formative assessments with  student data . This is non-graded information that may reflect how your students are learning, such as questions they've frequently answered incorrectly or subject areas where they've had trouble. After all, not everything has to be a grade!

With all of that said and done, let’s jump into summative assessments.

What Are Summative Assessments?

what-are-summative-assessments

Summative assessments are evaluations of what someone has learned throughout a course. 

Common summative assessments include:

  • Final exams
  • End-of-class projects

Summative assessments almost always take place at the end of a course unless a teacher decides to break a course into more manageable chunks. They’re often cumulative, and they’re used to evaluate a student’s long-term information retention.

In summative assessments like final exams, you can include questions from the first week or two of a course to ensure students retained introductory information. In other assessments like papers, your students can pull from a full marking period of learning to apply to a topic.

Either way, your students have to do some serious reflecting and critical thinking to bring together the information from an entire course.

This is a great way to ensure students retain essential information from one course to another. So if you teach introductory courses, summative assessments are perfect to set students up for success in their next classes.

That’s important because a student’s success in your classroom is just one step for them. When you prepare them for the next step, you make it easier for them to succeed in the future as well.

In that way, summative assessments serve two purposes:

First , they evaluate what someone learned while they’ve been in your class.

Second , they evaluate how prepared someone is to go to the next academic level.

Combined with the rest of a student’s performance in class, summative quizzing and assessments are excellent ways to gauge progress while ensuring long-term information retention.

Top 3 Summative Assessment Examples

summative-assessment-examples

Summative assessments are traditionally more structured and standardized than formative assessments.

Still, you have a few options to shake things up that go beyond a pen-and-paper test.

1. In-depth reports

Instruct students to choose a topic that resonated with them in class and report in-depth on it. This is a great opportunity for students to take an idea and run with it under your supervision.

These reports often showcase a student’s interest, and you’ll be able to evaluate a student’s engagement level in the class by how they approach the report.

The goal is a passionate, intelligent, and comprehensive examination of a concept that matters to a student. 

2. Cumulative, individual projects

Have your students pick a project to complete. This project should somehow reflect what they’ve learned throughout the course.

Projects are great for any practical application class from health science to physics. Creating a cross-section of the human heart, designing a diet, or creating a protective egg-drop vessel are all fun ways students can show off their knowledge of a topic.

3. Personal evaluation papers

Require students to apply principles from your class to their personal lives. These papers are excellent fits for psychology, nutrition, finance, business, and other theory-based classes.

In a nutshell, personal evaluations let students look at themselves through a different lens while exploring the nuances of the principles they learned in class.  Plus, it lets students do something everyone loves — talk about themselves!

Now that you have a few ideas on summative assessments, how can you track their success?

How Do You Track Summative Assessments?

While everyone has their own ideas on this topic, grades are the best way to evaluate someone’s success with a summative assessment.

How you grade is ultimately up to you. Presentations are great ways to grade someone based on a number of factors, including soft skills like public speaking. Written exams or project-based assessments are ideal to see a student’s full-scope understand of your class after a marking period.

Whatever you choose, stick to a consistent grading scale so you can identify your own strengths and weaknesses in the classroom as students complete your course. 

What’s More Important: Formative or Summative Assessments?

formative-vs-summative-assessments-more-important

Many new teachers have this question — are formative or summative assessments more important?

In a perfect world, they’re equally important. Formative assessments let students show that they’re learning, and summative assessments let them show what they’ve learned.

But American public education values summative assessments over formative assessments. Standardized tests — like the SATs — are great examples of high-value summative assessments.

It’s rare to find the same emphasis on formative quizzing and assessments. That’s because formative assessments act like milestones while summative assessments show the bottom line.

We encourage teachers to look at these assessments as two sides of the same coin. Formative and summative assessments work together flawlessly when implemented properly.

With all of that in mind, you only have one question left to answer. How are you going to add these assessments to your curriculum ?

Use Formative and Summative Assessments and Meet Your Challenges

As a teacher, you’ll likely need to employ both summative and formative assessments in your curriculum. An effective balance of these assessments will help you understand your students’ needs while meeting your standards.

However, CTE teachers face challenges in the classroom each day that sometimes get in the way of connecting with students and preparing them for these assessments.

If you want to feel less overwhelmed and spend more time helping your students succeed, download your free guide . You’ll learn about five of the most significant challenges teachers face and how you can overcome them.

Overcome Your Teaching Challenges

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Formative and summative assessments.

Assessment allows both instructor and student to monitor progress towards achieving learning objectives, and can be approached in a variety of ways. Formative assessment refers to tools that identify misconceptions, struggles, and learning gaps along the way and assess how to close those gaps. It includes effective tools for helping to shape learning, and can even bolster students’ abilities to take ownership of their learning when they understand that the goal is to improve learning, not apply final marks (Trumbull and Lash, 2013). It can include students assessing themselves, peers, or even the instructor, through writing, quizzes, conversation, and more. In short, formative assessment occurs throughout a class or course, and seeks to improve student achievement of learning objectives through approaches that can support specific student needs (Theal and Franklin, 2010, p. 151). 

In contrast, summative assessments evaluate student learning, knowledge, proficiency, or success at the conclusion of an instructional period, like a unit, course, or program. Summative assessments are almost always formally graded and often heavily weighted (though they do not need to be). Summative assessment can be used to great effect in conjunction and alignment with formative assessment, and instructors can consider a variety of ways to combine these approaches. 

Examples of Formative and Summative Assessments

Both forms of assessment can vary across several dimensions (Trumbull and Lash, 2013): 

  • Informal / formal
  • Immediate / delayed feedback
  • Embedded in lesson plan / stand-alone
  • Spontaneous / planned
  • Individual / group
  • Verbal / nonverbal
  • Oral / written
  • Graded / ungraded
  • Open-ended response / closed/constrained response
  • Teacher initiated/controlled / student initiated/controlled
  • Teacher and student(s) / peers
  • Process-oriented / product-oriented
  • Brief / extended
  • Scaffolded (teacher supported) / independently performed 

Recommendations

Formative Assessment   Ideally, formative assessment strategies improve teaching and learning simultaneously. Instructors can help students grow as learners by actively encouraging them to self-assess their own skills and knowledge retention, and by giving clear instructions and feedback. Seven principles (adapted from Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, 2007 with additions) can guide instructor strategies:

  • Keep clear criteria for what defines good performance - Instructors can explain criteria for A-F graded papers, and encourage student discussion and reflection about these criteria (this can be accomplished though office hours, rubrics, post-grade peer review, or exam / assignment wrappers ). Instructors may also hold class-wide conversations on performance criteria at strategic moments throughout a term.
  • Encourage students’ self-reflection - Instructors can ask students to utilize course criteria to evaluate their own or a peer’s work, and to share what kinds of feedback they find most valuable. In addition, instructors can ask students to describe the qualities of their best work, either through writing or group discussion.
  • Give students detailed, actionable feedback - Instructors can consistently provide specific feedback tied to predefined criteria, with opportunities to revise or apply feedback before final submission. Feedback may be corrective and forward-looking, rather than just evaluative. Examples include comments on multiple paper drafts, criterion discussions during 1-on-1 conferences, and regular online quizzes.
  • Encourage teacher and peer dialogue around learning - Instructors can invite students to discuss the formative learning process together. This practice primarily revolves around mid-semester feedback and small group feedback sessions , where students reflect on the course and instructors respond to student concerns. Students can also identify examples of feedback comments they found useful and explain how they helped. A particularly useful strategy, instructors can invite students to discuss learning goals and assignment criteria, and weave student hopes into the syllabus.
  • Promote positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem - Students will be more motivated and engaged when they are assured that an instructor cares for their development. Instructors can allow for rewrites/resubmissions to signal that an assignment is designed to promote development of learning. These rewrites might utilize low-stakes assessments, or even automated online testing that is anonymous, and (if appropriate) allows for unlimited resubmissions.
  • Provide opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance - Related to the above, instructors can improve student motivation and engagement by making visible any opportunities to close gaps between current and desired performance. Examples include opportunities for resubmission, specific action points for writing or task-based assignments, and sharing study or process strategies that an instructor would use in order to succeed.  
  • Collect information which can be used to help shape teaching - Instructors can feel free to collect useful information from students in order to provide targeted feedback and instruction. Students can identify where they are having difficulties, either on an assignment or test, or in written submissions. This approach also promotes metacognition , as students are asked to think about their own learning. Poorvu Center staff can also perform a classroom observation or conduct a small group feedback session that can provide instructors with potential student struggles. 

Instructors can find a variety of other formative assessment techniques through Angelo and Cross (1993), Classroom Assessment Techniques (list of techniques available here ).

Summative Assessment   Because summative assessments are usually higher-stakes than formative assessments, it is especially important to ensure that the assessment aligns with the goals and expected outcomes of the instruction.  

  • Use a Rubric or Table of Specifications - Instructors can use a rubric to lay out expected performance criteria for a range of grades. Rubrics will describe what an ideal assignment looks like, and “summarize” expected performance at the beginning of term, providing students with a trajectory and sense of completion. 
  • Design Clear, Effective Questions - If designing essay questions, instructors can ensure that questions meet criteria while allowing students freedom to express their knowledge creatively and in ways that honor how they digested, constructed, or mastered meaning. Instructors can read about ways to design effective multiple choice questions .
  • Assess Comprehensiveness - Effective summative assessments provide an opportunity for students to consider the totality of a course’s content, making broad connections, demonstrating synthesized skills, and exploring deeper concepts that drive or found a course’s ideas and content. 
  • Make Parameters Clear - When approaching a final assessment, instructors can ensure that parameters are well defined (length of assessment, depth of response, time and date, grading standards); knowledge assessed relates clearly to content covered in course; and students with disabilities are provided required space and support.
  • Consider Blind Grading - Instructors may wish to know whose work they grade, in order to provide feedback that speaks to a student’s term-long trajectory. If instructors wish to provide truly unbiased summative assessment, they can also consider a variety of blind grading techniques .

Considerations for Online Assessments

Effectively implementing assessments in an online teaching environment can be particularly challenging. The Poorvu Center shares these  recommendations .

Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher Education 31(2): 2-19.

Theall, M. and Franklin J.L. (2010). Assessing Teaching Practices and Effectiveness for Formative Purposes. In: A Guide to Faculty Development. KJ Gillespie and DL Robertson (Eds). Jossey Bass: San Francisco, CA.

Trumbull, E., & Lash, A. (2013). Understanding formative assessment: Insights from learning theory and measurement theory. San Francisco: WestEd.

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Explainer: what’s the difference between formative and summative assessment in schools?

formative vs summative

Senior Lecturer in Educational Assessment, Macquarie University

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The recent Gonski report argues Australia needs assessment and reporting models that capture both achievement progress and long-term learning progress. This, according to the review panel, involves low-stakes, low-key, and regular formative assessments to support learning progressions. The report used international evidence on individualised teaching to demonstrate ongoing formative assessment and feedback is fundamental to supporting students to do better in school.

The NSW Education Minister, Rob Stokes, has called for NAPLAN to be replaced in “haste” with less high stakes tests. Mark Scott, the secretary of the NSW Department of Education, echoed Stokes’ remarks. He stated :

I think [NAPLAN] will become obsolete because the kinds of information that the new assessment schemes will give us will be richer and deeper and more meaningful for teachers, for parents and for education systems.

So, what’s the difference between formative and summative assessment? And when should each be used? Formative and summative assessment have different purposes and both have an important role to play in a balanced assessment program.

formative vs summative

Formative assessment

Formative assessment includes a range of strategies such as classroom discussions and quizzes designed to generate feedback on student performance. This is done so teachers can make changes in teaching and learning based on what students need.

It involves finding out what students know and do not know, and continually monitoring student progress during learning. Both teachers and students are involved in decisions about the next steps in learning.

Read more: Marking answers with a tick or cross won't enhance learning

Teachers use the feedback from formative tasks to identify what students are struggling with and adjust instruction appropriately. This could involve re-teaching key concepts, changing how they teach or modifying teaching resources to provide students with additional support. Students also use feedback from formative tasks to reflect on and improve their own work.

Regular classroom tasks, whether formal (for example, traditional pen and paper tests) or informal (such as classroom discussions), can be adapted into effective formative tasks by:

making students aware of the learning goals/success criteria using rubrics and carefully tracking student progress against them

including clear instructions to guide students through a series of activities to demonstrate the success criteria. A teacher might, for example, design a series of activities to guide students through an inquiry or research process in science

providing regular opportunities for feedback from the teacher, other students or parents (this feedback may be face-to face, written, or online)

making sure students have opportunities to reflect on and make use of feedback to improve their work. This may involve asking students to write a short reflection about the feedback on their draft essay and using this to improve their final version.

There are many advantages of formative assessment:

feedback from formative assessment helps students become aware of any gaps between their goal and their current knowledge, understanding, or skill

tasks guide students through the actions necessary to hit learning goals

tasks encourage students to focus their attention on the task (such as undertaking an inquiry or research process) rather than on simply getting the right answer

students and teachers receive ongoing feedback about student progress towards learning goals, which enables teachers to adjust their instructional approach in response to what students need

students build their self-regulation skills by setting learning goals and monitoring their progress towards them

results of formative assessments can also be used for grading and reporting.

formative vs summative

Summative assessment

This includes end of unit examinations and the NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) examination.

Summative assessment provides students, teachers and parents with an understanding of the pupil’s overall learning. Most commonly thought of as formal, time-specific exams, these assessments may include major essays, projects, presentations, art works, creative portfolios, reports or research experiments. These assessments are designed to measure the student’s achievement relative to the subject’s overall learning goals as set out in the relevant curriculum standards.

The design and goals of summative assessments are generally standardised so they can be applied to large numbers of students, multiple cohorts and time periods. Data collected on individual student, cohort, school or system performance provides schools and principals with a tool to evaluate student knowledge relative to the learning objectives. They can also compare them with previous cohorts and other schools.

Read more: Evidence-based education needs standardised assessment

The measurement and evaluation of student achievement this way gives us necessary information about how we can continuously improve learning and teaching.

There are a number of limitations of summative assessment. While formative assessments usually provide feedback for the student to review and develop their learning, summative assessments are rarely returned to students. When assessments provide only a numerical grade and little or no feedback, as the NSW HSC does, it’s hard for students and teachers to pinpoint learning needs and determine the way forward.

Additionally, being a form of “high stakes” assessment, results may be perceived as a way of ranking students. For high achieving students there is recognition and reward, while for the lower performing students there is potential embarrassment and shame. Neither of these things should be associated with an equal opportunity education system.

The author would like to acknowledge the work of David McDonald, a PhD student at Macquarie University in assessment, in writing this article.

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Home » Blog » Formative and Summative Assessments: Examples and Differences

Formative and Summative Assessments: Examples and Differences

formative vs summative

One of the primary benefits of using formative and summative assessments is that you aren’t forced to choose between them. They work exceptionally well when used in combination.

In this article, we’ll be breaking down precisely what formative and summative assessments are, the key differences between them, the benefits of their use, and providing a range of examples to help illustrate how they can be implemented in the classroom.

If you’re looking for an effective way to assess student learning and measure progress, read on to find out how formative and summative assessments can help.

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Formative assessments: definition and purpose.

Before we get into examples of their use, it’s essential that we first define precisely what both formative and summative assessments are and how they differ.

Formative assessments are employed regularly throughout a set learning period, be that a chapter, unit, or term, and help track progress and identify areas where students may struggle or need more support.

They also give the teacher and course designer the data they need to improve the learning experience and make any necessary changes that may be required throughout a system.

Rather than strict exams, formative assessments are usually relatively low-stakes, meaning they do not always need to be graded or even marked. This helps to create a non-threatening atmosphere and encourages students to take risks in their learning without fear of failure.

Formative assessment tasks usually rely on feedback from both students and the teacher, with learners receiving feedback on performance as soon as possible.

Uses of Formative Assessments

As mentioned, one of the primary uses of a formative assessment is to gauge student understanding and identify knowledge gaps that may need extra work.

Formative assessments can also be used to help inform curricular decisions, provide valuable data on the effectiveness of a course or lesson, and allow students to monitor their progress over time.

In addition, formative assessments are valuable in helping teachers gain real-time insight into a group’s collective understanding, allowing them to rapidly adapt their training or lessons accordingly.

Benefits of Using Formative Assessments

There are a range of benefits to employing formative assessments as part of your teaching strategy, including the following:

  • Improved student or employee engagement and motivation – By allowing students to track their learning journey, you can help them take ownership of their learning experience. This can be highly motivating for students, as it encourages a sense of progress and accomplishment.
  • Better assessment of real-world understanding – By using formative assessments that involve practical skills or application, you can better understand how well your students understand the real-world implications of the content they are studying.
  • Enables rapid identification of areas of difficulty for learners – Through formative assessments, you can quickly identify areas that students may be struggling with. This helps to ensure that these areas are addressed rapidly and effectively.
  • Allows teachers to tailor their lessons to the needs of the group – Teachers and course designers can use the data from formative assessments to tailor their studies according to the group’s needs and ensure that they meet all learning objectives.

examples_pen

Examples of Formative Assessments

To clarify how formative assessments can be used, below are a few examples of tasks that could be used both in the classroom and in a digital learning environment.

Classroom-Based Examples

The following examples can be valuable to employ in a classroom setting:

1. Quizzes and polls

Simple and easy to execute, quizzes and polls are a low-effort way of gauging student understanding at regular intervals throughout a lesson.

2. Peer feedback and self-assessment

Peer-based feedback sessions and self-assessment questionnaires can help identify areas where students may need extra support or guidance while giving vital insight into how students perceive their progress.

3. Class discussions and debates

Encouraging students to discuss their different perspectives on a given topic or concept allows teachers to better understand how well they comprehend the material. It also gives students the opportunity to have their ideas heard and helps create a sense of solidarity within the classroom.

Online and Digital Examples

With the rise in the use of digital learning tools and technologies , there is also a range of online-based practices that can be used as formative assessments, including:

1. Interactive quizzes and games

The gamification of quizzes or other learning activities can provide an engaging way to assess student understanding and offer real-time feedback.

2. Virtual simulations and case studies

Where more vocational skills are being taught, virtual simulations and case studies can test students’ problem-solving capabilities in a low-stakes environment.

3. Online discussion forums and feedback platforms

One of the benefits of using an online learning platform is the wide range of features available to assess student understanding. Discussion forums, peer feedback platforms, and automated feedback systems can all be used as formative assessment tools.

definition

Summative Assessments: Definition and Purpose

Compared to formative assessments, summative assessments are conducted at the end of a defined learning period and often represent the final grade for the course.

To provide a comprehensive assessment grade, summative assessments evaluate a student’s overall understanding and performance of the skill or concept studied.

They can also be used to track educational progress over time, such as in standardised testing, as well as help to inform curricular decisions and the effectiveness of teaching methods.

Uses of Summative Assessments

Summative assessments test student mastery of content, assess their overall understanding of a subject or topic area and generally give them a final mark.

For teachers and course designers, a summative assessment allows them to measure the effectiveness of their teaching and make any necessary changes or improvements.

Summative assessments can also be used to compare student performance across different classes, courses, and programs.

Benefits of Summative Assessments

As with formative assessments, there is a range of benefits associated with the use of summative assessments, including:

  • Provides an overall assessment score – Summative assessments can provide a more accurate assessment of student understanding and performance, offering an overall grade or score.
  • Helps track educational progress over time – Educators can track student progress to identify improvement areas through standardised testing or other summative assessments.
  • Helps inform curricular decisions – Summative assessments can assess the effectiveness of a particular course or program and help inform future curricular choices.
  • Offers an efficient way to measure learning outcomes – By providing an overall assessment grade, summative assessments offer a convenient way to measure the success of a teaching strategy in one go.

examples

Examples of Summative Assessments

To clarify how summative assessments can be implemented, here are a few examples of traditional assessment methods, such as essays and exams, and performance-based assessments, such as presentations and projects.

Traditional Assessment Methods

Below are some examples of traditional assessment methods:

1. Examinations and final tests

Examinations are widely used to assess student knowledge and understanding at the end of a course or program. They are easy to implement and provide a quick and efficient way to evaluate student performance.

2. Term papers and essays

Essays and term papers are another traditional assessment method used alongside examinations. Essays test students’ ability to analyse a given topic or concept in detail, providing insight into their understanding of the subject matter.

3. Projects and presentations

Where skill-based or vocational courses are being taught, projects and presentations can test a student’s performance in class. These assessments allow students to demonstrate their understanding of the subject matter and show their ability to apply and transfer the knowledge in a practical context.

Performance-Based Assessments

Performance-based assessments are best employed when assessing practical skills or processes. Examples of performance-based summative assessments include:

1. Practical exams and demonstrations

Practical tests and demonstrations are often used to assess students’ physical abilities, such as in sports or vocational courses. These assessments test a student’s understanding of a particular skill or concept by having them demonstrate it in a real-world setting.

2. Portfolios and showcases

Where creative or design-based courses are being taught, portfolios and showcases allow students to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts in a practical way. These assessments require students to use their creative skills to produce a tangible output, such as an artwork or multimedia presentation.

3. Capstone projects and dissertations

Dissertations and capstone projects are often used to assess students’ understanding of complex topics or skills. These assessments require students to demonstrate their knowledge of the subject matter by producing an in-depth research or project that meets specific criteria.

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Critical Differences Between Formative and Summative Assessments

Now that you have a fuller understanding of what both formative and summative assessments represent and how they can be employed, here’s a summary outlining the key differences between the two:

Timing and Frequency

One of the most essential distinctions between the two types of assessment is when they are conducted. Formative assessments occur throughout the course and act as checkpoints to monitor student progress.

In contrast, summative assessments are shown at the end of a defined learning period and only count towards an overall grade or score.

Purpose and Focus

Formative assessments are designed to provide feedback on understanding and inform instruction in real-time. In contrast, summative assessments evaluate student performance of a skill or concept and can help inform curriculum decisions.

Feedback and Evaluation Process

The feedback and evaluation process for formative and summative assessments differs significantly. Formative assessments are designed to offer real-time feedback on performance.

In contrast, summative assessments provide an overall assessment score or grade that reflects the student’s understanding of the subject matter at the end of a course or program.

not-sure

Which is the Right Assessment Approach to Utilise?

Choosing the correct assessment approach for your students ultimately depends on the goals you are trying to achieve, the type of course or program being taught and the knowledge and skills that need to be assessed.

To help you decide, consider the following:

Considerations for Selecting Formative Assessments

Some of the critical considerations for making use of formative assessments include:

  • Regular feedback – Formative assessments should be implemented regularly to ensure students receive regular feedback on their understanding and performance.
  • Low-stakes testing – As formative tests don’t count towards an overall grade, they should be designed as low-stakes tests to help encourage participation.
  • Inform instruction – Formative assessment results can inform instruction in real-time, allowing educators to tailor their teaching approach to student needs.

Considerations for Selecting Summative Assessments

When making use of summative assessments, it’s essential to consider the following points:

  • Assessment goals – Before designing a summative assessment, clearly define the purposes of the evaluation and how it will be used to evaluate student performance.
  • Assessment criteria – When creating a summative assessment, ensure that you set clear and concise evaluation criteria that allow students to demonstrate their understanding fully.
  • Inter-rater reliability – To ensure fairness and accuracy, consider having multiple assessors score each student’s work when creating a summative assessment.

Using Both Formative and Summative Assessments in Learning and Development

As mentioned, one of the primary benefits of using formative and summative assessments in learning and development is that they can provide a more comprehensive evaluation of student performance.

By implementing both assessment forms, educators can better understand their student’s progress and tailor their instruction for maximum impact.

Formative assessments can measure progress and inform instruction in real-time, while summative assessments provide an overall score or grade that indicates learning success.

Final Thoughts

While formative and summative assessments have apparent differences, such as in their purpose, timing and feedback mechanisms, there are significant benefits to using both assessment types in learning and development.

Educators can better assess student performance and tailor instruction by implementing formative and summative assessments. Additionally, the use of both reviews provides a comprehensive view of understanding that can be used to inform curriculum decisions.

If you are looking for more guidance and resources on creating and implementing formative and summative assessments, check out the other articles on the Skillshub blog .

As experts in developing eLearning content , Skillshub can help create customised learning materials tailored to your organisation’s needs. To learn more about our services, get in touch with us today.

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Sean McPheat

Sean is the CEO of Skillshub. He’s a published author and has been featured on CNN, BBC and ITV as a leading authority in the learning and development industry. Sean is responsible for the vision and strategy at Skillshub, helping to ensure innovation within the company.

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Formative And Summative Assessment: The Differences Explained

Tim handley.

The assessment landscape in schools is often confusing and ever-changing. With the debate between the merits of formative vs summative assessments raging on, it can be difficult to know when to use either of these assessment types in your classroom. That’s why, in this article, we will discuss when you should use either type of assessment and explain why.

Formative vs summative assessments – what is the difference?

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simple explanation of formative and summative assessments

When teachers discuss assessment, they often refer to two types – ‘formative’ and ‘summative’, however the distinctions and lines between the two types of assessment can often be blurred and misunderstood.

This article will compare and contrast formative and summative assessments to give you a true view of the difference between both types.

Formative assessment is the use of day-to-day assessments to gauge and explore students’ understanding of a topic.

It is best thought of as an assessment for learning. 

Formative assessments are what we carry out to help inform the learning ‘in the moment’. Formative assessment is continuous, informal and should have a central and pivotal role in every math classroom.

If used correctly, it will have a high impact on current learning and help you guide your instruction and teaching by giving ongoing feedback on learners’ progress.

Having an assessment with low stakes allows students to develop their skills, confidence and user experience before attempting a summative assessment with high stakes. It also makes room for self-assessment.

Summative assessments take place after students’ have completed a block of work, whether that be at the end of a unit or at the end of a quarter. They are a more formal way to sum up student progress and are often compared against a standard benchmark.

They are best thought of as assessments of learning.

There are different types of summative evaluations that we carry out ‘after the event’, often periodic (rather than continuous), and they are often measured against a set standard.

Summative assessment can be thought of as helping to validate and ‘check’ formative assessment – it is a periodic measure of how children are, overall, progressing in their mathematics learning.

If formative assessment has been continually carried out, then the results of summative assessment shouldn’t yield any surprises.

Some common examples of summative assessment include:

  • Final projects

Importantly, it is not the ‘form’ that assessment takes that determines whether it is formative or summative, instead it is how it is being used.

For example, ‘test style questions’ can be used both as formative assessment (perhaps as exit tickets – questions given to students at the end of the lesson to check student understanding) or summative (perhaps as an end of an instructional unit test or check).

It is important that in all subjects, but especially in math, that we use a combination of both assessment strategies, but that formative assessment, due to its constant nature, makes up the bulk of our assessment activities.

This Venn diagram shows the difference and similarities between the two assessment types very clearly.

venn diagram showing the difference and similarities of formative and summative assessments

Formative assessment is an intrinsic part of both teaching and student progression. This form of assessment does not rely upon tests and results, but rather the ability to adapt to classroom blockers as they arise. 

It should indicate what a good piece of work is and why this is the case, but it also gives you as a teacher a chance to see when things are not going so well and act upon it and see improvements. 

Good formative feedback will enable both the teacher and student to plan together what the next stage of their progression will be and future learning goals.

During a lesson, all adults in the classroom should be on a ‘constant assessment mission’ through interactions with students. 

Teachers should be moving around the room, interacting with each child, and assessing their progress towards the learning objective in real-time.

In the moment, assessment can take many forms:

• You could use a question from your shared learning to assess where you need to give independent work, or which students need further support

• It could be as simple as asking key questions to students during their independent work 

• You could use ‘exit tickets’ to assess children’s understanding at the end of a lesson

However, it is important that this ‘in the moment’ assessment that is carried out has a purpose, and that this information is used to adapt the learning experiences and opportunities that you are providing to each child.

The information obtained from formative assessments can help you understand the student’s learning processes and adapt to this in future lesson plans.

If your assessment shows that students are secure, then how are you going to deepen their learning?

If your assessment shows that students have some misconceptions, then how are you going to support these?

These are just two of the questions you should be asking yourself throughout a formative assessment.

If you are looking for a way to bring formative assessments into your classroom, take a look at our blog containing your Math Intervention Must-Have: Formative Diagnostic Assessment Tests.

There are a lot of different assessment routines you can use to keep up with the progression of your math class.

Common types of formative assessment include:

  • Group activities
  • Class projects
  • Presentations

Make sure that your assessment ‘routines’ have purpose and use. 

For example, if you are going to do the ‘math lesson classic’ and ask children to show you an answer on a mini-whiteboard, make sure you are actually looking at the answers given by all students. 

You should then be using these to inform the next step in your lesson and the learning for each student.

I have observed many lessons where teachers have carried out the mini-whiteboard ‘routine’, not actually looked at the responses given, and carried on with what they had planned regardless. 

Remember- it is not the activity or ‘thing’ that you do that represents effective assessment, but what you do with the information you gather from it. 

It is through effective in-lesson assessment that you can ensure that each student is supported and challenged, and that every student is learning rather than constantly rehearsing what they already know.

I often use a ‘pothole’ analogy with the schools I work with. Imagine a local council were filling in potholes but that their road maintenance vehicles were themselves creating new holes in the road.

They wouldn’t be doing a very good job at improving the overall quality of the road surface would they?

Yet, schools often inadvertently do the same with math. They are often very good at carrying out a plethora of intervention activities to fill gaps (or potholes) that have been ‘left’ from previous years, but, at the same time, often allow new gaps (or potholes) to be created.

It is therefore important that we use our constant, ‘in the moment’ assessment to help ensure that no new gaps are being allowed to form in a student’s mathematical understanding and learning.

Make sure that you use your ‘in the moment’ and ‘end of lesson’ assessment to help fill any new gaps that are starting to emerge.

Then, at the end of the math lesson, you formatively check that all students are secure with the objective for that lesson, and if not, you carry out some form of intervention to help address these gaps.

If you are not going to address the gaps now, then who is and when?

Summative assessment helps to demonstrate the extent of students’ success in meeting specific goals. It is a method that can be used to quantify achievement, and due to its data driven nature, it is a great way to provide a numerical basis for a student’s next step.

However, while the principles of summative assessment are simple, there are 4 key points you need to consider before implementing it in your classroom.

1- Assessment systems vs framework – What are you assessing against?

Despite the power of ‘in the moment’ formative assessment, schools do need a way to track the attainment and progress of students throughout the school. 

It is this need that means that schools also need to consider the assessment framework they are using- i.e. what you are assessing against. This decision is often one that is taken at district level.    

However, it is important that you are clear about the difference between your assessment system and the framework you are using. 

Often with my work in schools, I am told that they are using ‘student asset’, ‘classroom monitor’, ‘target tracker’ (and many others) as their assessment. In fact, these are all assessment systems – bits of software that allow you to record and track student’s progress against a framework that has been chosen by your school. 

They are not what you are using to ‘assess’- merely what you are using to record your assessment.   

These assessment systems all allow you to select (and often create your own) framework upon which to assess your students – and it is these frameworks that are vitally important.

2- Balancing the frameworks is crucial

When choosing, or creating, the assessment framework that you are using, it’s important to consider the balance of objectives and target areas of mathematics within the framework.

Some end-of-grade tests may give a higher weight towards number based objectives, with number, calculations and proportionality making up between 75-85% of a child’s final result. 

Yet, most grades have an even split between all standard domains.

This essentially means that a child could be legitimately marked as ‘secure’ or ‘working at aged related expectations’ against the whole curriculum, on the basis of their strength in geometry, but they wouldn’t be classed as ‘secure’ or ‘working at aged related expectations’ in a standardized test.

It is therefore important that whatever framework you use is balanced, and includes an equal weighting of standards-based questions.

There are many ways in which you can do this, including:- 

• Use built-in ‘weighting’ functions of some assessment systems that allow you to weight each objective. 

• Assess against key objectives only, which overall, have the balance of number vs non-number objectives.

• Group objectives together, creating the overall numbers vs non-number balance. 

• Use a commercially available assessment framework which has the weighting work done for you.

3- Teacher assessment plays a huge role in summative assessment

Once your school has decided on a framework to use for assessment, next comes the question of how it is actually used. 

These frameworks can be used both in a purely ‘summative’ way, or in a formative way that leads to, over time, an accurate summative assessment. 

The traditional use of these frameworks is for schools to ask for each child to be assessed against the framework at set points – for example, midway through the school year or end-of-grade tests. 

This often leads to ‘assessment panic’ with teachers feeling overwhelmed having to create the assessment against many objectives for all students in their task in a short period of time.

If this is the only way in which these frameworks are used, then these are being used purely summatively – it is the teacher’s judgment at the end of a quarter/year. 

Due to the stress of having to meet a deadline and make a judgment against each objective for all students in your class, this can often mean that these summative only teacher assessments are not as accurate as many would like.

Luckily, you can adapt these assessments very easily

However, these frameworks can also be used in a more formative way – with teachers being encouraged to record the learning progress towards objectives on the framework or rubric as they are being taught .

An example of this is recording and amending judgements each week as a result of the ‘ongoing’ assessment. This leads to an ever-changing snapshot of each child’s performance, which can be really powerful.

This can be used to inform interventions and subsequent teaching, and help to identify common misconceptions, giving the assessment framework used by your school both a summative and formative use. 

These assessments can then just be finalized in time for whatever deadline of ‘snapshot’ date your school set.

It is fantastic that many schools and districts are favoring teacher assessment to provide this ‘data.’ 

Teacher assessment is incredibly powerful, and gives teachers the professional autonomy that they deserve. 

4- Testing can’t be forgotten about either

Many schools will also choose to use some form of testing alongside their assessment frameworks.

This can be seen as helping to validate teacher assessment judgments, and can also help to ensure there are no ‘nasty’ surprises when it comes to state standardized tests.

However, testing is only as good as the quality of the tests that you use. It is important that the tests your schools rely on have the same degree of ‘standardization’.

They should be standardized so you know how children across the country perform, and be based on a clear test development framework, and have been trialed and refined in schools. 

Some popular tests that have been developed in this way include STAR Math and Terra Nova.

Regardless of what tests are used, it is also important that schools and teachers understand that they provide a snapshot of the performance on the day the test was taken.

Children, just like adults, all have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days, and it is important that these tests are seen as a supplement to good quality teacher assessment, not a replacement for it.

Both formative and summative assessment have a very important role to play in the classroom and in schools. However, it is very important to ensure that you find the right balance between the two approaches for your own class’s learning needs.

Constant formative assessment can prove difficult if not implemented properly, but consistent assessment of students strengths and weaknesses can prove invaluable in helping them to progress.

Summative assessment can often not show the whole picture of a students’ progression, but it is a fantastic way of getting a data driven overview of how a student has progressed and grown over a period of time.  

The goal of this blog was to summarize the difference between formative and summative assessment, and the conclusion is that both approaches have their flaws, but they can also both provide a valuable insight into how a class is getting on throughout the school year.

All that is left is to use assessments of both kinds to inform your teaching!

Do you have students who need extra support in math? Give your students more opportunities to consolidate learning and practice skills through personalized math tutoring with their own dedicated online math tutor. Each student receives differentiated instruction designed to close their individual learning gaps, and scaffolded learning ensures every student learns at the right pace. Lessons are aligned with your state’s standards and assessments, plus you’ll receive regular reports every step of the way. Personalized one-on-one math tutoring programs are available for: – 2nd grade tutoring – 3rd grade tutoring – 4th grade tutoring – 5th grade tutoring – 6th grade tutoring – 7th grade tutoring – 8th grade tutoring Why not learn more about how it works ?

The content in this article was originally written by math consultant and author Tim Handley and has since been revised and adapted for US schools by elementary math teacher Katie Keeton.

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Learning and teaching

  • Formative vs Summative

The purpose of formative assessment is to monitor student learning and provide ongoing feedback to staff and students. It is assessment for learning. If designed appropriately, it helps students identify their strengths and weaknesses, can enable students to improve their self-regulatory skills so that they manage their education in a less haphazard fashion than is commonly found. It also provides information to the faculty about the areas students are struggling with so that sufficient support can be put in place.

Formative assessment can be tutor led, peer or self-assessment. Formative assessments have low stakes and usually carry no grade, which in some instances may discourage the students from doing the task or fully engaging with it.

The goal of summative assessmen t is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. Summative assessments often have high stakes and are treated by the students as the priority over formative assessments. However, feedback from summative assessments can be used formatively by both students and faculty to guide their efforts and activities in subsequent courses.

An over-reliance on summative assessment at the conclusion of an element of study gives students a grade, but provides very little feedback that will help them develop and improve before they reach the end of the module/programme. Therefore achieving a balance between formative and summative assessments is important, although one that students don't always fully grasp and/or take seriously. Formative assessments, provide a highly effective and risk-free environment in which students can learn and experiment. They also provide a useful lead-in to summative assessments, so long as feedback is provided. 

To engage students in formative assessment:

  • Explain the rationale behind formative assessment clearly – make it clear to students that through engaging with formative tasks they get to gain experience with their assessments, risk-free, and can develop far stronger skills in order to obtain better grades in the summative assessments.
  • Create a link between summative and formative assessment – design formative assessments in such a way that they contribute to the summative task. This lowers the workload on the students and provides them with necessary feedback to improve their final performance. An example of such assessment is producing an essay plan, a structure of a literature review, part of the essay or bibliography.
  • Lower the number of summative assessments and increase the number of formative assessments – yet do not allow one single summative assessment to carry too much weight in the final grade.

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Formative and Summative Assessment

Assessment helps instructors and students monitor progress towards achieving learning objectives. Formative assessment is used throughout an instructional period to treat misconceptions, struggles, and learning gaps. Summative assessments evaluate learning, knowledge, proficiency, or success at the conclusion of an instructional period.

Below you will find formative and summative descriptions along with a diagram, examples, recommendations, and strategies/tools for the next steps.

Descriptions

Formative assessment  (Image 1, left) refers to tools that identify misconceptions, struggles, and learning gaps along the way and assess how to close those gaps. It includes practical tools for helping to shape learning. It can even bolster students’ ability to take ownership of their education when they understand that the goal is to improve learning and not apply final marks (Trumbull and Lash, 2013). It can include students assessing themselves, peers, or even the instructor, through writing, quizzes, conversation, and more. Formative assessment occurs throughout a class or course and seeks to improve student achievement of learning objectives through approaches that can support specific student needs (Theal and Franklin, 2010, p. 151). In the classroom, formative assessment centers on practice and is often low-stakes. Students may or may not receive a grade.

In contrast,  summative assessments (Image 1, right) evaluate student learning, knowledge, proficiency, or success after an instructional period, as a unit, course, or program. Summative assessments are almost always formally graded and often heavily weighted (though they do not need to be). Summative assessment can be used to significant effect in conjunction and in alignment with formative assessment, and instructors can consider a variety of ways to combine these approaches. 

Two diagrams showing the when, why, and how of formative and summative assessment. Formative: Help students to learn and practice, when - throughout the course, why - identify gaps and improve learning, how - via approaches that support specific student needs. Whereas, summative asses student performance, when at the end of an instructional period, why - collect evidence of student knowledge, skills or proficiency, how - via exit learning or a cumulative assessment.

Examples of Formative and Summative Assessments

Formative: l earn and practice.

  • In-class discussions
  • Clicker questions (e.g., Top Hat)
  • 1-minute reflection writing assignments
  • Peer review
  • Homework assignments

Summative: Assess performance

  • Instructor-created exams
  • Standardized tests
  • Final projects
  • Final essays
  • Final presentations
  • Final reports
  • Final grades

Formative Assessment Recommendations

Ideally, formative assessment strategies improve teaching and learning simultaneously. Instructors can help students grow as learners by actively encouraging them to self-assess their skills and knowledge retention, and by giving clear instructions and feedback. Seven principles (adapted from Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, 2007 with additions) can guide instructor strategies:

1. Keep clear criteria for what defines good performance

Instructors can explain criteria for A-F graded papers and encourage student discussion and reflection about these criteria (accomplish this through office hours, rubrics, post-grade peer review, or  exam/assignment wrappers . Instructors may also hold class-wide conversations on performance criteria at strategic moments throughout the term.

2. Encourage students' self-reflection.

Instructors can ask students to utilize course criteria to evaluate their own or peers’ work and share what kinds of feedback they find most valuable. Also, instructors can ask students to describe their best work qualities, either through writing or group discussion.

3. Give students detailed, actionable feedback

Instructors can consistently provide specific feedback tied to predefined criteria, with opportunities to revise or apply feedback before final submission. Feedback may be corrective and forward-looking, rather than just evaluative. Examples include comments on multiple paper drafts, criterion discussions during 1-on-1 conferences, and regular online quizzes.

4. Encourage teacher and peer dialogue around learning

5. promote positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem.

Students will be more motivated and engaged when assured that an instructor cares for their development. Instructors can design assignments to allow for rewrites/resubmissions in assignments to promote learning development. These rewrites might utilize low-stakes assessments, or even automated online testing that is anonymous, and (if appropriate) allows for unlimited resubmissions.

6. Provide opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance

Related to the above; instructors can improve student motivation and engagement by making visible any opportunities to close gaps between current and desired performance. Examples include opportunities for resubmission, specific action points for writing or task-based assignments, and sharing study or process strategies that an instructor would use to succeed.

7. Collect information to help shape teaching

Instructors can feel free to collect useful information from students to provide targeted feedback and instruction. Students can identify where they are having difficulties, either on an assignment or test or in written submissions. This approach also promotes metacognition, as students reflect upon their learning. 

Instructors may find various other formative assessment techniques through  CELT’s Classroom Assessment Techniques .

Summative Assessment Recommendations

Because summative assessments are usually higher-stakes than formative assessments, it is especially important to ensure that the assessment aligns with the instruction’s goals and expected outcomes. 

1. Use a Rubric or Table of Specifications

Instructors can use a rubric to provide expected performance criteria for a range of grades. Rubrics will describe what an ideal assignment looks like, and “summarize” expected performance at the beginning of the term, providing students with a trajectory and sense of completion. 

2. Design Clear, Effective Questions

If designing essay questions, instructors can ensure that questions meet criteria while allowing students the freedom to express their knowledge creatively and in ways that honor how they digested, constructed, or mastered meaning.

3. Assess Comprehensiveness. 

Effective summative assessments allow students to consider the totality of a course’s content, make deep connections, demonstrate synthesized skills, and explore more profound concepts that drive or find a course’s ideas and content. 

4. Make Parameters Clear

When approaching a final assessment, instructors can ensure that parameters are well defined (length of assessment, depth of response, time and date, grading standards). Also, knowledge assessed relates clearly to the content covered in course; and provides students with disabilities required space and support.

5. Consider Anonymous Grading. 

Instructors may wish to know whose work they grade, to provide feedback that speaks to a student’s term-long trajectory. If instructors want to give a genuinely unbiased summative assessment, they can also consider a variety of anonymous grading techniques (see hide student names in SpeedGrader Canvas guide ).

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Explore the following approaches and methods which emphasize prevention and education.

  • Nicol, D.J. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher Education 31 (2): 2-19.
  • Theall, M. and Franklin J.L. (2010). Assessing Teaching Practices and Effectiveness for Formative Purposes. In: A Guide to Faculty Development . KJ Gillespie and DL Robertson (Eds). Jossey Bass: San Francisco, CA.
  • Trumbull, E., & Lash, A. (2013). Understanding formative assessment: Insights from learning theory and measurement theory . San Francisco: WestEd.

Formative and Summative Assessment, by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) at Iowa State University is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 . This work, Formative and Summative Assessment, is a derivative of Formative and Summative Assessment developed by the Yale University Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning(retrieved on June 23, 2020) from https://poorvucenter.yale.edu/Formative-Summative-Assessments.

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Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

Damon Torgerson : Sep 19, 2022 4:00:00 PM

Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Student learning is a priority for teachers, assistant superintendents, parents, and anybody else with a stake in student outcomes. It’s not always possible to tell how much a student is learning when in the middle of a lesson or a study unit – and after students have completed the unit or semester, while it’s possible to assess how much students have retained, it’s important to do so in a manner that’s accurate and fair.

At Alludo, it’s our mission to provide teachers and staff with relevant and accessible professional learning to empower them to help students. That includes making sure that they understand the differences between formative and summative assessments, both of which are part of our Alludo content catalog . Here’s what you should know about it.

Table of Contents

What is formative assessment, what is summative assessment, what are the key differences, entry and exit slips, quizzes and polls, interview/chat with students, self-assessment, end-of-unit or end-of-chapter tests, final projects or portfolios, achievement tests, standardized tests (sat/act), how do summative and formative assessments work together.

  • Alludo's Take

What is the Difference Between Formative and Summative Assessment?

Teachers should use both formative and summative assessments in the classroom, so let’s start by defining each and exploring the differences between them.

Formative assessment is assessment that occurs in the course of student learning. Instead of waiting until after students have completed a unit of study, formative evaluation happens during the unit and serves as a sort of checkup to track student progress and, if necessary, to get them back on track if they’re not where they should be.

Sometimes, formative assessment may be as simple as observing students in class and evaluating their learning. At other times, it may be more rigorous, allowing teachers to collect concrete information about what students are learning and whether they’re understanding it.

Either way, formative assessment is a powerful tool because it allows teachers to understand where students are, identify those who might be struggling with course material, and provide them with personal guidance when necessary.

Summative assessment is assessment that takes place after student learning has been completed. Unlike formative assessment, which can happen on the fly in the classroom, summative assessments must be planned and administered at key points in the school year.

The purpose of a summative evaluation is to measure how much students have retained from what they have learned. This type of assessment must be used in conjunction with standards on a district or state level.

The stakes with summative assessment are typically high and may determine whether a student is getting promoted to the next grade or getting a diploma.

formative vs summative

Here are some of the key differences between formative and summative assessments.

Formative Assessments Are Measurements For Student Learning

Because formative assessments are conducted in the classroom and in the course of learning, they are assessments for learning. Said another way, their purpose is to facilitate student learning by capturing a snapshot of student progress and allowing teachers to course correct as needed.

Summative Assessments Are Measurements Of Student Learning

Summative assessments happen after student learning is complete, which makes them assessments of learning instead of for learning. Their purpose is to determine what students have learned and how well they have retained it. They may be useful to provide a big picture view.

Formative Assessments Can Change Students’ Learning Trajectory

One of the biggest differences between formative and summative assessments is that formative assessments have the potential to change students’ learning trajectories for the better. Because they help teachers get a handle of students’ progress and understanding of new concepts, they can be used to reevaluate teaching strategies and meet students where they are to make sure they learn and retain the material being taught.

Summative Assessments Need More Structure Than Formative Assessments

The high-stakes nature of summative assessments requires careful planning when administering them to make sure that the results are accurate and reliable. For example, multiple choice questions must be meticulously written to eliminate bias and there should be clear rubrics that are used during evaluation.

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What Are Examples of Formative Assessments?

Formative assessments occur in the classroom in most cases and they can take a variety of forms depending on the teacher’s preference and the tools they have available. In many cases, teachers can use technology to assist them in making formative assessments.

Entry and exit slips can be a useful tool for teachers who want to assess student learning and understand how students feel about what they’re learning. Teachers may opt for the low-tech route, handing out slips of paper to ask basic questions about learning. For example, after a lesson about possessive pronouns, a teacher might ask students to list these pronouns. There’s also the option of using ed tech tools such as Padlet or Poll Everywhere to gather student responses.

Quizzes are a common assessment tool and they don’t need to be lengthy to be useful. Asking even a few questions about course material can help teachers assess students’ progress. Here again, teachers may choose to use apps and ed tech to help them. Two examples are Kahoot and Quizlet .

Talking one-on-one with each student for a few minutes can tell teachers a lot about how well students are learning and whether their needs are being met. While an in-person interview may be best for many students, teachers can use tools such as Seesaw and Flipgrid for students who are introverted or may feel awkward sharing their progress in person.

Self-assessments can be extremely useful to teachers. Some of the tools we’ve already mentioned, such as Seesaw, can be used for this type of assessment. Teachers may also employ low-tech options, such as listing concepts on a white board and asking students to put a sticky note where they need the most help.

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What Are Examples of Summative Assessments?

As we mentioned above, summative assessments are more formal than formative assessments and must include some type of rubric to be sure that students understand how they will be assessed. Here are some examples of summative assessments.

Administering a test at the end of a chapter or the end of a unit is useful because there are stakes but they’re not as high as they would be with a midterm or final exam. The test should be created using information collected in formative assessments and teachers should do everything possible to help students prepare.

In some classes, assigning a final project or evaluating a student portfolio may be part of summative assessment. For example, an art teacher might review a student’s portfolio of work at the end of a term or semester. A final project may be assigned in any subject. In either case, teachers should communicate the rubric they will use to evaluate the completed project or portfolio.

Achievement tests may be administered in the middle of a term or semester or at the end as a final exam. These tests are designed to measure a student’s achievement in a course and should be comprehensive. It’s important for teachers to tell students what material will be covered and the format of the test, and to write questions in a way that’s fair and unbiased.

Standardized tests are a form of summative assessment that is out of teachers’ control, at least in terms of the material that’s included and the format and wording of questions. However, teachers can and should help students prepare using practice tests and other tools.

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Ultimately, formative and summative assessments must work together to give teachers a complete picture of student learning. 

Formative and summative assessments can’t substitute for one another because, as noted above, they serve different purposes. However, they should be used in tandem to help teachers assess student learning in the moment and in the long term. Teachers can and should conduct formative assessments prior to a summative assessment. Doing so will allow them to provide extra help to students who need it and make sure that their students are confident in what they have learned.

Both formative and summative assessments can guide teachers and school administrators as they develop future lesson plans and even assist with district-wide curriculum planning. Formative assessments may lead to revamped lesson plans and can inform how teachers approach student learning.

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Alludo’s Take

Here at Alludo, we’ve worked hard to curate a catalog of relevant and useful content for teacher professional development. Assessment is a core topic and our catalog includes 29 microlearning activities related to formative and summative assessments.

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We make it easy for teachers to learn about assessment by incorporating elements of choice and gamification into our learning platform. Assessment is a priority topic because we know that teachers who use both summative and formative assessments throughout the school year are setting their students up for success and delivering the best possible learning outcomes.

Provide Your Teachers with the Experience to Use Both Summative and Formative Assessments

Using both formative and summative assessments to evaluate student learning and progress is one of the most effective ways we know to deliver optimal student outcomes. The Alludo Content Catalog provides teachers and administrators with the information they need to assess student progress using both methods.

Want to reach up to 100% PD in your district? See how Alludo can help make it happen with our free professional development platform trial, including:

  • Hundreds of core topics
  • Asynchronous microlearning activities
  • Timely and specific feedback
  • Analytics that show learning impact
  • Access anytime, anywhere

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“It would take us years to roll out all the PD that we can on Alludo." - Kathy Jackson, Director of Teaching and Learning for K-12, YCJUSD

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Teaching@Tufts

Teaching@Tufts

Supporting excellence in learning and teaching at Tufts University

Formative and Summative Feedback

formative vs summative

The terms formative and summative are often used to describe types of evaluation and feedback that instructors develop for students. Here’s how these two types of assessments function in student learning:

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Formative feedback activities are typically ungraded or low-stakes opportunities to promote and measure student knowledge and skills. Formative feedback is ongoing and helps faculty to focus on student learning and students to better understand the limits of their own knowledge and how to improve. By determining what students have learned and what is unclear, instructors can focus the class more effectively to meet the learning needs of that group. This may mean reviewing some areas, or spending less time in other areas.  Formative feedback can increase student motivation and self-directed learning and help them to become self-directed learners.  Examples of formative feedback techniques include many interactive classroom activities, homework and surveys.

By way of contrast, summative feedback typically falls at the end of a topic or semester.  It provides an evaluation of how much a student and the class has learned and is often connected to a grade.  When tied to specific class learning objectives it can be used as course feedback, providing the instructor with feedback about the effectiveness of the course design.  Examples of summative feedback techniques include exams, final projects, and research reports.

  • Teaching@Tufts’ list of  Assessment Techniques include several examples of formative and summative feedback strategies.
  • Integrating Inclusive and Sustainable Assessments in your Online Teaching from Beginning to End

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  • Formative Vs Summative Assessment: 15 Key Differences & Similarities

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Today, we will look at 2 of the most common methods of course evaluation—summative assessment and formative assessment. While the primary goal of both methods of evaluation is to assess students undergoing a particular course, they have different objectives and use data differently. 

Sometimes, the lines between summative and formative evaluation can be blurry. But how do these 2 methods of assessment compare against each other and more importantly, when should you opt for one option over the other? In this article, we will discuss 15 key differences and similarities between formative and summative assessment. 

What is Formative Assessment?

Formative assessment is an on-going method of evaluation that helps teachers to monitor learners’ progress and identify any challenges that students are facing as they learn. It includes a series of quick-fire tests that provide on-time feedback on students’ performance. 

The objective of formative assessment is to find out how much students know as they move from one learning phase to another. There are no high stakes attached to formative evaluation and the students’ performances are not measured against a rubric or standardized benchmark. 

Quizzes, polls, and dipsticks are common examples of formative assessment . Discussion-based assessments like 5-minute unstructured interviews work well for this too. Interviews take you right into the minds of the students and provide relevant contexts for understanding how much they know. 

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What is Summative Assessment?

Summative assessment is a traditional method of evaluation where the teacher measures the student’s performance using a standardized benchmark. It is done at the end of the course or instructional unit and it focuses on the program’s outcomes. 

Unlike formative evaluation, summative assessment has a high point value which is why it is used to determine whether the student gets a promotion, passes a course, or moves to the next level in her learning. A teacher can solely rely on the results of an end-of-term examination to grade the students and promote them. 

Summative assessment methods are not spontaneous; they follow defined processes with controlled conditions that limit inconsistencies. One of the strong points of summative assessment is it produces similar results when it is done in a controlled context. Other examples of summative assessment include chapter tests, portfolios, and final essays. 

Differences Between Formative and Summative Assessment  

Summative assessment is a type of course evaluation that happens at the end of a program while formative assessment is a method of collecting real-time feedback from learners during the course. Summative assessment is all about measuring the student’s performance at the end of the class using some defined criteria. 

On the other hand, formative assessment methods focus on how much the students know. Formative evaluations use different approaches to monitor the students’ progress, gather feedback from them and identify any learning gaps that need to be filled. 

Characteristics  

The characteristics of summative assessment include validity, reliability, variety, and practicality. Summative assessment is a standardized method of knowledge-based assessment that is easily-reported. This means it always ends up with a concise summary of the outcomes of the evaluation.  

Unlike summative assessment, the formative evaluation does not measure the student’s progress against a benchmark or rubric, and this means its findings are non-graded. Instead, formative assessments focus on gathering actionable feedback that can improve the learning experience for the students. 

End-of-term examinations, in-class chapter tests, hands-on performance tasks, and oral tests are common summative assessment types. On the other hand, impromptu quizzes, silent polls, and dipsticks are some of the most common methods of formative evaluation. 

Summative assessment methods help the instructor to measure the student’s performance against a standard or rubric. On the flip side, methods of formative evaluation are used to monitor the student’s knowledge as they move from one level to the other in the learning process. 

Examples of summative assessment include organizing an end-of-term recital or presentation for a course, and standardized admission examinations like SAT, IELTS, and A-levels. For formative assessment, the instructor can ask students to create visual sketches or write a summary of a lecture topic or theme. 

Advantages of Formative Assessment

Unlike summative assessment that waits till the end to assess students, formative assessment provides instant feedback on students’ progress by evaluating them as they learn. Another advantage of formative assessment is it allows for changes and modifications to the teaching method as learning progresses. 

Formative assessment supports personalized learning; teachers can use the feedback they get to create unique learning experiences for every student. It also boosts the students’ participation in the training program and makes them actively involved in monitoring their own progress. 

Advantages of Summative Assessment  

One major strong point of summative assessment is that it motivates the students to learn and pay attention in class. Unlike what you get with formative assessment, students know that their grades depend on how well they perform in summative evaluations and this boosts their commitment to the training.  

Summative assessments produce consistent results and this is why it works best for grading. Unlike formative assessment methods that are uniquely tailored to the needs of the students, summative evaluation methods are designed to produce similar results when applied in similar contexts. 

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One of the most important tools used for summative assessment is a rubric or scoring guide which is used to assess the quality of responses given by the students. During formative assessments, the instructor does not need to use a rubric because it is a non-graded evaluation method.

Quizzes, examination software, and online test platforms are other common tools used for summative assessment. Formative evaluation, on the other hand, uses surveys, polls, focus groups, and different types of interviews to monitor students’ experiences and knowledge as they learn. 

The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate the student’s understanding of the course and the course materials within a specific period. On the other hand, the primary purpose of formative assessment is to observe students as they learn and get real-time feedback on their knowledge and experiences. 

Formative assessments use different tools and methods to monitor knowledge and skill-acquisition at different points in the learning curve. Summative assessment, on the flip side, is all about grading the quality of a student’s knowledge based on his or her performance. 

The goal of formative evaluation is improving the teaching and learning process based on the feedback from students while the goal of summative evaluation is to grade a student’s performance with a performance marker like a rubric or other defined benchmarks. 

This means that while formative assessment evaluates learning and knowledge-progression, summative assessment collects evidence as proof of a student’s proficiency in the course. 

Summative assessment pays attention to the outcome as measured by a performance marker while formative assessment focuses on the on-going learning process. Due to its focus on the on-going learning experience, formative assessment encourages changes and modifications to the learning process based on the feedback from the program participants. 

Summative assessments produce quantitative data as results while formative assessment results in qualitative data. Quantitative data has statistical value because it is measured in the form of numbers while qualitative data is the type of data that describes information using groups and categories. 

Summative data produces quantitative results because it grades the students’ performance using a standard benchmark. Summative results are non-graded and are typically presented as descriptions with feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the students. The instructor uses this feedback to improve the teaching method. 

Frame of Reference

Formative assessments use a normative frame of reference during evaluation. A frame of reference is a complex set of assumptions that defines our perceptions and creates meaning. 

A normative frame of reference entails comparing a student’s performance to the performance of other students. For instance, after a reading exercise, a student can rank 12th in a group of 43 other learners. 

Summative assessment, on the other hand, has a criterion frame of reference. A criterion frame of reference means that the students are evaluated using standard criteria. Criterion-referenced interpretations allow us to compare a student’s performance to a well-defined content domain, to show their level of knowledge of a subject matter. 

Formative assessment gives feedback on the students’ progress as they learn and teachers act on this feedback to improve the course, learning materials, and the teaching method. After a formative assessment, the students continue to learn while the teacher makes any changes to improve their learning experience. 

On the other hand, feedback is not an important part of summative evaluation. Although students may receive feedback on their performance, this may not change their grades or trigger a re-evaluation of their performance. Summative assessment is the final evaluation of a student’s performance. 

Summative assessments have a rigid benchmark known as the benchmark of learning while formative assessment uses the benchmark of progress to evaluate students as they learn. The benchmark of progress monitors student progress and provides feedback that improves the teaching method. 

On the other hand, a benchmark of learning measures the students’ performance against institution standards that serve as the standard of evaluation. 

Time-Frame  

Summative assessment happens at the end of a course, training, or program while formative assessment happens as learning takes place. This means that while there may only be 1 summative assessment for an instructional unit, formative evaluation happens many times within the learning process. 

Read More: Formative Assessment: Meaning, Types & Examples

Similarities Between Summative and Formative Assessment?  

Course evaluation methods.

Summative assessment and formative assessment are methods of course evaluation. Course evaluation happens when an instructor assesses students based on their performance or participation in training. It helps the teacher to evaluate the effectiveness of the course; whether during the course or at the end. 

Summative and formative assessments are used to gather students’ feedback. However, while feedback is an important part of formative assessment as teachers need to act on it, summative assessment feedback is routine and does not have any immediate influence on the results of the evaluation or how the students are graded. 

Summative and formative assessments can be done using surveys, questionnaires, and quizzes. However, these tools will be used distinctly, and the data will be interpreted differently, depending on the type of assessment. 

When to Use Formative Assessment

You should use formative assessment when you need to monitor students’ knowledge and progress on the learning curve. Formative assessment helps you to discover concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills that are difficult for them to acquire, or learning standards they have not yet achieved. 

When to Use Summative Assessment

You should use summative assessment when it is time to evaluate learning. It works best in cases where you need to evaluate how well the information has been absorbed and retained by the students. Summative assessments help you discover student mastery of the course content. 

Conclusion  

Having a clear understanding of summative and formative assessments helps you to monitor the progress towards the learning objectives and to also improve the teaching and learning process. Summative and formative assessments work simultaneously to define the learning and teaching experience. 

A strong classroom assessment program combines formative and summative assessment methods to give a balanced evaluation of the students’ knowledge and skills. With careful thought and planning processes, the instructor will collect useful and important information that speaks to specific learning purposes. 

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Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

Odette Falone

When we hear assessment, we usually think of formal education and students trying their best to answer questions on a piece of paper in complete silence. However, even in education, assessments can take many forms. And, if you’re a teacher, supervisor, principal, or even an involved parent, chances are you’ve heard of terms like summative vs. formative assessments, internal vs. external (state-wide) assessments, or maybe even placement and diagnostic assessments. 

What do all of them mean?

In its most general form, the concept of assessment refers to all activities that people use to quantify and systematically document another person’s knowledge, skills, attitudes, or even beliefs. The purpose of assessments is a societal attempt at standardizing knowledge and skills, so we can track progress among individuals, see whether the material was understood, and predict future performance. 

Because the concept is so broad, there are many ways to classify all the different types of assessments found in an educational context. Yet, one of the most popular and inclusive ways to classify assessment types is based on their objective in education. Therefore, based on the objective, we recognize four different assessment types: placement, diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments.

Let’s briefly review them all and then specifically focus on summative vs. formative assessments, so you can fully understand their place, purpose, and use within the curriculum.

Types of Educational Assessment

Being able to distinguish between all the different types of assessments allows teachers and administrators to create better policies and leverage the insights assessments bring without overwhelming the students.

As we already mentioned, the most popular way to classify assessments is based on their objective , so let’s see what each of these assessment types involves.

Placement Assessment

Placement assessment is when schools use formal or even standardized tests and previous achievements to rank and place students at the most appropriate level, find them the most suitable teacher, or even figure out whether they’re a good fit for the school.

Diagnostic Assessment

Diagnostic assessment is a tool to help identify differences in learning or potential learning difficulties. This allows teachers to make sure all students can follow the pace of the group and receive the attention they need to fulfill their full educational potential.

Summative vs. Formative Assessments

The reason why formative and summative assessments are the current hot topic in education is because they represent what we typically mean when we say assessment. They’re created by the teachers and used in the classroom to assess students' progress on the subject material. However, the similarities end here.

In short, formative assessments are smaller tests or quizzes, polls, or even game-like evaluations that teachers use throughout the course to gather insights about the students’ knowledge or skills. On the other hand, summative assessments , as the word suggests, are tests at the end of the course, semester, or term that evaluate how much knowledge students have accumulated during the course.

The objective between these two evaluations is different. For formative assessments the objective is for teachers to gather feedback, understand how their lecturing is being received, understand how their students are progressing, and identify potential difficulties that need to be addressed.

For summative assessment, the objective is for teachers to evaluate how much students have learned. This way, teachers can place students on a standardized scale that allows higher educational institutions or recruiters to make judgements about their accumulated knowledge/skills.

Let’s explain their benefits and use in greater detail and provide actual examples that will help you understand formative and summative assessments a lot better.

Formative Assessments

Formative assessments are all activities that educators use to evaluate students’ learning progress during the course. They’re very versatile and can be used on a daily or weekly basis.

The purpose of formative assessments is to monitor students’ progress - not grade it or quantify it. They’re a valuable source of feedback that teachers can use to adjust their teaching pace, identify where students struggle, and continue with the curriculum in a way that suits students’ needs best.

Because of this, formative assessments are also called assessments for learning .

When they’re designed properly and students understand their purpose, formative assessments can guide students and encourage self-awareness and self-discipline through the feedback they’ll receive . This is because they'll see how much of the lecture material they have actually consolidated and are capable of using it on their own.

How Do Formative Assessments Work?

Another characteristic thing about formative assessments is that they work best when they’re used consistently. This means on a regular schedule; whether that’s daily, weekly, or bi-weekly is up to you. The reason for this is that with continuity, teachers will be able to estimate students’ progress much more accurately. 

When students do one test or quiz or even play a game, their performance is a result not only of their skills, but also some unpredicted (X) factors, such as sleepiness, tiredness, anxiety, emotional state, interest in the topic, lucky guesses, and so on. These X factors can’t be controlled nor removed from the equation, but they vary from one test to another. Because of this, doing regular tests and averaging the results can paint a much clearer picture of the students’ actual skills. 

Insights from Regular Formative Assessments

To give you an example, let’s imagine that a student has done five formative assessments in math in the last month. Their performance on all the tests but one is excellent. However, on the last quiz they did significantly worse than what they usually do. Here’s how teachers can interpret this.

The first step is to contextualize the student's performance. For instance, because of the previous examples of the students’ performance, teachers can identify this outcome as abnormal or atypical behavior that requires their attention. On the other hand, if this was a summative assessment, the conclusion would be that the student’s knowledge of the matter is poor.

The second step is for teachers to check the curriculum to see whether the poor performance is associated with a particular topic. Then, they should see whether the other students performed worse than usual on this topic as well. If yes, it indicates that they were probably underprepared for the topic in question, but if everyone else performed as they usually do, teachers should focus on the individual.

If teachers realize that only one or two students performed suboptimally, the third step is to have a talk with them to figure out if it is something that requires further action or it’s due to circumstantial factors, like:

  • problems at home; 
  • problems with peers;
  • difficulty understanding the topic;
  • performance anxiety;
  • not being prepared
  • being distracted
  • technical problems (if it was online), etc.

By now, you can see how formative assessments give a solid framework for teachers to identify problems and give students the attention they need to overcome obstacles and realize their full learning potential.

Formative Assessments Types

Based on who’s involved, formative assessments can be divided in three categories:

  • Teacher-led assessments - tests/quizzes designed, monitored, and evaluated by the teacher. 
  • Peer-led assessments - tests/quizzes designed by the students or teachers, but monitored and evaluated by groups of students (group work , work in pairs, etc). 
  • Self-assessment - tests/quizzes designed by students or teachers, but monitored and evaluated by the students individually (individual work, homework, self-assessment, etc).

Another way to classify formative assessments is based on the resources used. Classical assignments consist of a piece of paper and a pencil. However, formative assignments can take many forms, including:

  • group presentations;
  • in-class games;
  • online quizzes;
  • digital or physical flashcards (whether for self-assessment or in class);
  • learning platforms based on gamification;
  • hands-on activities;
  • debates, and more.

Below, we’ll share a few examples of popular formative assessments in education.

Examples of Formative Assessments

Formative assignments should encourage creative expression, be related to the course material, and reflect the skills and knowledge students are in the process of learning. Here are three unique examples.

  • Creating a Video Response

Today, students are incredibly tech-savvy and are comfortable with technology. Teachers can use that to their advantage and ask students to create a video on a specific topic.

Online assessment tools, such as Flipgrid , can easily turn this idea into a reality. Flipgrid is an incredibly simple learning platform that allows students to respond with a video on teachers’ questions or assignments.

This is a great way to see how students will decide to express themselves and find creative ways to complete the assignment in a video format. Open-ended questions, as well as drawing or storytelling assignments usually suit this format well.

Students can document the growth of a plant (for biology), the movement of the stars (for astrology), make an animated infographic about their favorite town (for geography), and so on.

  • “My Learning Board” Group Work

Organize students into groups of four or five individuals and ask them to fill out a collage-style board with some of the most important things they have learned so far, key ideas, skills, and expectations (what they expect to learn in the future).

After they’re done, ask the groups to present their board to the class and explain why they included the things they did. This way, everyone will get a chance to see what others have learned, what they think is important, and what they expect in the future.

At the end of the assignments, encourage students to share their thoughts, so together you can reach a conclusion on the most important ideas, highlights, and skills for that topic/course/subject.

  • Online Quizzes

Digital classrooms are far from perfect, but when it comes to formative assessments, technology is your friend. Game-based learning platforms, such as Kahoot, are an amazing tool for revising the material while having fun.

You can create small quizzes with 5-6 questions regarding some of the key ideas or highlights of the previous lecture. Then, 5 to 10 minutes before the next lecture starts, students can answer the quiz on their phones while you read out the questions.

In the end, the three fastest and most accurate students will get a gold medal from Kahoot - a symbolic recognition that’s stimulating and encourages a friendly competition, but it does not affect the students' grades.

Finally, you can use the insights from Kahoot later to assess your student’s knowledge on that particular topic.

Summative Assessments

Summative assessments represent the more typical exams or school tests at the end of the year. Their goal is to measure the students’ knowledge at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it to some standard or benchmark. The most popular examples of summative assessments are high stakes, standardized tests in the US, such as the SATS or other graduation exams.

Summative assessments are almost always at the end of the year or a semester, unless the teacher decides to cut the material into smaller, independent units. If that’s the case, then students usually get a final grade that’s an average of all the summative assessments throughout the year.

As you can see, while formative assessments provide informal feedback and aid the learning process, summative assessments have a more deterministic nature and significantly impact the students’ future.

Because of this, summative assessments have a bad reputation. Experts and educational policy-makers have an ongoing debate about the positive and negative impacts of summative assessments in education, especially in young students. 

Advantage of Summative Assessments

Here are some of the benefits this type of assessment provides.

  • Summative assessments provide structure, transparency, and clear framework for educational institutions to evaluate and compare students’ yearly progress, even transgenerationally (comparisons between generations).
  • Summative assessments provide students with a standardized and accredited proof of their achievements.
  • Contrary to popular belief, when done properly, summative assessments motivate students to work harder.
  • Summative assessments are the foundation of almost all academic reports (especially in higher education).

Disadvantage of Summative Assessments

On the other hand, the downsides of summative assessments include:

  • Causing performance anxiety and stress in students.
  • Causing demotivation and fear in students.
  • Questionable validity - since there are no do-overs and students get only one chance, many people are questioning whether the results are an actual representation of students’ skills.
  • Not a good representation of the school's curriculum - one assessment at the end can’t cover all the major points that have been taught throughout the year.

Examples of Summative Assessments

Unlike formative assessments, summative evaluations are not flexible nor creative. On the contrary, they’re formal, standardized, with a very fixed structure, and  most of the time, teachers must follow the schools’ evaluation requirements when they create them.

Summative assessments can also be imposed by the state. There are statewide formal evaluations created by the ministry or state departments of education and they’re the same for everyone. Examples of popular statewide summative assessments include SATs, TA SAK, CLT, Stanford Achievement Test, TerraNova, PSAT/NMSQT , and others.

Other examples of summative assessments include:

  • End of year exams for specific subjects. For instance, finals in math, English literature, physics, and more.
  • Special program learning qualifications such as the International Baccalaureates.
  • End of class projects or papers - requirements that students must complete to successfully finish the course, gain credits, and/or move to more advanced courses.
  • In-depth reports - the teachers provide quantitative as well as qualitative (structured) feedback of the students’ engagement level, efforts, and skills.
  • Hands-on projects   - in higher education, students might sometimes get a chance to complete a hands-on project where they’ll have to use all the skills they’ve learned to successfully finish it. For instance, conducting a social experiment (social studies), designing a diet (nutrition), building a robot (engineering), building an app (computer science), and so on.
  • Cumulative portfolio - in arts or other creative programs, students might need to showcase a portfolio of all of their assignments throughout the year. For instance, a collection of their drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, creative writing projects, and so on.

The last two examples are very atypical and unique summative assessments that are usually applied in university programs or other specialized training programs, not public schools.

Summative vs. Formative Assessments: Which is Better?

An ongoing debate and controversy is surrounding the concept of assessment, especially summative assessments and assessments in early education. For instance, there are concerns that educational institutions have become assessment-led rather than learning-led. In the US, high-stake tests such as high school graduation examinations or exit examinations are causing the most controversy, and they’re summative assessments.

Naturally, this has led to revolution that aims to make knowledge-building practices a priority. Some believe the answer is in formative assessments.

Are formative assessments the answer?

There are many ways in which formative assessments are better. For instance, formative assessments promote collaboration, curiosity, and engagement, and give teachers valuable insights about the students’ progress while there’s still time for them to intervene . 

Summative assessments, on the other hand, pit students against each other because their objective is to compare their performance and rank them. This leads to anxiety, resentment, and frustration. On top of that, many people question their validity. Can one test authentically represent the students' knowledge, skills, and their potential for learning? What if a student who knows the material, is incredibly smart, curious, driven, passionate, and gives 110% in every class fails because they have a crippling test anxiety?

While concerns like these are completely justified, without summative assessments the whole educational system will have to be redefined from the ground up. And, it doesn’t seem like we have an answer for all the questions that follow. For instance, what happens to accreditation (a review process to determine if educational programs meet defined standards of quality)?

This means that while yes, formative assessments are better, they’re not a replacement for summative assessments. So, for now, we need to understand their value and work to redefine and improve aspects of them. 

To conclude, while the debate on the topic of summative vs. formative assessment is valuable , both evaluations have their place and use in schools, especially higher education. Teachers and administrators need to understand their impact on students, and work to provide a better, more relaxed atmosphere with a framework that’s focused on learning .

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Formative and summative assessments – what’s the difference?

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Clare Sealy, Head of Education Improvement within the Education Office at the State of Guernsey, looks at the two key umbrella terms used in assessment.

The language of summative and formative assessment is used to distinguish between assessment used for different purposes. In a nutshell, formative assessment helps guide further learning; summative assessment evaluates learning at the end of a period of study, often by comparing it against a standard or benchmark.

Formative assessment includes:

Diagnostic assessment: This provides teachers with the data needed to diagnose individual learning needs and plan how to help learners make further progress. Diagnostic assessment is mainly for teachers rather than learners. If a learner does not know enough about a topic, then they do not need feedback, they need more teaching.

Motivational assessment: This provides learners (or their parents/carers) with information about what the learner has done well and what they can do to improve future learning. For motivational assessment to be effective, it must tell the learner something that is within their power to act on. Telling a child to ‘include more detail,’ when they don’t have the knowledge to do so, is demotivating and counter-productive. Only where the gap between actual and desired performance is small enough for the learner to address it with no more than a small nudge, can feedback be motivating. On the other hand, feedback about effort, attendance, behaviour or homework provides information that can motivate learners to make different choices. 1

Self-assessment: Learner agency, resilience and independence can be built by teaching metacognitive self-assessment strategies. Teaching learners about the power of retrieval practice, and how they can use this to enhance their learning, is a very powerful strategy and should form a central plank of each learner’s self-assessment repertoire. Learners should also be taught strategies for checking their own work – for example monitoring writing for transcription errors, reading written work aloud to check for sense and clarity, or using inverse operations in maths to check for answers.  

Summative assessment includes:

Informative assessment: This enables schools to report information about performance relative to other learners, to parents/carers.

Evaluative assessment: This enables schools to set targets and evaluate their performance. Evaluative assessment can also feed into system-wide data allowing MATs, local authorities and the DfE to monitor and evaluate the performance of the schools’ system at an individual school and whole-system level.

Of all of these different types of assessment, I believe diagnostic assessment is the most important as it enables teachers to respond to the learning needs of children. However whatever type of assessment you chose, you need to ensure you are assessing both short- and long-term understanding, for example:

  • In the moment, as teachers teach, in order to flex their teaching on the spot to clarify and address misconceptions
  • After lessons, through looking at learners’ work, in order to plan subsequent lessons to meet learner needs
  • At the end of units of work, in order to evaluate how successful teaching of a particular topic has been and what might need to be improved the next time this unit is taught
  • In the longer term, in order to check what learners have retained over time and provide opportunities for revisiting and consolidating learning that has been forgotten.

In a nutshell, assessment, whether formative or summative, holds the potential to provide invaluable insights into individuals and groups of children, but just make sure this is not done in isolation.  

1 Some children may face additional barriers that make it much more challenging to make improvements in one or more of these areas. Young children are not responsible for their attendance, for example. Some children with SEMH need more than information to help them improve their behaviour.

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Formative vs. summative evaluations.

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July 28, 2019 2019-07-28

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In the user-experience profession, we preach iteration and evaluation. There are two types of evaluation, formative and summative, and where you are in the design process determines what type of evaluation you should conduct.

Formative evaluations focus on determining which aspects of the design work well or not, and why. These evaluations occur throughout a redesign and provide information to incrementally improve the interface.

Let’s say we’re designing the onboarding experience for a new, completely redesigned version of our mobile app. In the design process, we prototype a solution and then test it with ( usually a few ) users to see how usable it is. The study identifies several issues with our prototype, which are then fixed by a new design. This test is an example of formative evaluation — it helps designers identify what needs to be changed to improve the interface.

Formative evaluations of interfaces involve testing and changing the product, usually multiple times, and therefore are well-suited for the redesign process or while creating a new product.

In both cases, you iterate through the prototyping and testing steps until you are as ready for production as you’ll get (even more iterations would form an even better design, but you have to ship at some point). Thus, formative evaluations are meant to steer the design on the right path.

Summative evaluations describe how well a design performs , often compared to a benchmark such as a prior version of the design or a competitor. Unlike formative evaluations, whose goals is to inform the design process, summative evaluations involve getting the big picture and assessing the overall experience of a finished product. Summative evaluations occur less frequently than formative evaluations, usually right before or right after a redesign.

Let’s go back to our mobile-app example. Now that we’ve shipped the new mobile app, it is time to run a study and see how our app stands in comparison to the previous version of the app. We can gather the time on task and the success rates for the core app functionalities. Then we can compare these metrics against those obtained with the previous version of the app to see if there was any improvement. We will also save the results of this study to evaluate subsequent major versions of the app. This type of study is a summative evaluation since it assesses the shipped product with the goal of tracking performance over time and ultimately calculating our return on investment . However, during this study, we might uncover some usability issues. We should make note of those issues and address them during our next design iteration.

Alternatively, another type of summative evaluations could compare our results with those obtained with one or more competitor apps or with known industry-wide data.

All summative evaluations paint an overview picture of the usability of a system. They are intended to serve as reference points so that you can determine whether you’re improving your own designs over time or beating out a competitor.

The ultimate summative evaluation is the go/no-go decision of whether to release a product. After all is said and done, is your design good enough to be inflicted on the public, or do we think that it will harm our brand so badly that it should never see the light of day? It’s actually rare for companies to have a formal process to kill off bad design, which may be why we encounter many releases that do more harm than good for a brand. If you truly embrace our proposition that brand is experience in the digital age, then consider a final summative evaluation before release.

In This Article:

Origin of the terms, when each type of evaluation is used, research methods for formative vs. summative evaluations.

The terms ‘formative’ and ‘summative’ evaluation were coined by Michael Scriven in 1967. These terms were presented in the context of instructional design and education theory, but are just as valuable for any sort of evaluation-based industry.

In the educational context, formative evaluations are ongoing and occur throughout the development of the course, while summative evaluations occur less frequently and are used to determine whether the program met its intended goals. The formative evaluations are used to steer the teaching, by testing whether content was understood or needs to be revisited, while summative evaluations assess the student’s mastery of the material.

Recall that formative and summative evaluations align with your place in the design process. Formative evaluations go with prototype and testing iterations throughout a redesign project, while summative evaluations are best for right before or right after a major redesign.

Great researchers begin their study by determining what question they’re trying to answer. Essentially, your research question is the same as the type of evaluation. Below is a list of possible research questions you might have and the corresponding evaluation. For that reason, this table is descriptive, not prescriptive.

After it is clear which type of evaluation you will conduct, you have to determine which research method you should use. There is a common misconception that summative equals quantitative and formative equals qualitative ­­— this is not the case.  

Summative evaluations can be either qualitative or quantitative. The same is true for formative evaluations.

Although summative evaluations are often quantitative, they can be qualitative studies, too. For example, you might like to know where your product stands compared with your competition. You could hire a UX expert to do an expert review of your interface and a competitor’s. The expert review would use the 10 usability heuristics as well as the reviewer’s knowledge of UI and human behavior to produce a list of strength and weaknesses for both your interface and your competitor’s. The study is summative because the overall interface is being evaluated with the goal of understanding whether the UX of your product stands up to the competition and whether a major redesign is warranted.

Additionally, formative evaluations aren’t always qualitative, although that is often the case. (Since it’s recommended to run an extended series of formative evaluations, it makes financial sense to use a cheaper qualitative study for each of them.) But sometimes big companies with large UX budgets and high level of UX maturity  might use quantitative studies for formative purposes in order to ensure that a change to one of their essential features will perform satisfactorily.  For instance, before launching a new homepage design, a large company may want to run a quantitative test on the prototype to make sure that the number of people who will scroll below the fold is high enough. 

Formative and summative evaluations correspond to different research goals. Formative evaluations are meant to steer the design on the correct path so that the final product has satisfactory user experience. They are a natural part of any iterative user-centered design process. Summative evaluations assess the overall usability of a product and are instrumental in tracking its usability over time and in comparing it with competitors.

Greenstein, Laura.  What Teachers Really Need to Know About Formative Assessment . ASCD, 2010.

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formative vs summative

Difference Between Formative and Summative Assessment

Assessments are the most important step in the learning process. They help determine if the learning objectives of a course…

Formative Assessment vs Summative Assessment

Assessments are the most important step in the learning process. They help determine if the learning objectives of a course have been met. Assessment affects many facets of learning, including learning progress, student grades, placement, advancement, curriculum, instructional needs and the educational institutions’ growth and funding.

Assessments can be categorized as diagnostic (assessment for learning), formative (assessment as learning), and summative (assessment of learning). Although these have been in practice for a long time, many people struggle to comprehend the difference between formative and summative evaluation.

We will discuss the difference between formative and summative evaluation across various dimensions in this article and understand how they can help improve learning.

Difference Between Formative and Summative Assessment With Examples

Formative vs. summative assessment, the dimensions of formative vs. summative assessment, monitoring and feedback, learning progression, assessment design, assessment in practice.

Summative assessments are used to assess the learning, skill acquisition and achievement at the end of a learning period, typically at the close of the unit, semester, or course.

Three primary criteria define summative assessments:

  • Determining whether the learner has learned the study material and to what degree
  • Determining learning progress and achievement, the course’s effectiveness, and measuring progress toward improvement goals
  • Recording the scores/grades for the permanent academic record

Generally, summative scores are used in learning advancements such as admissions to higher learning institutions.

Formative assessments are used to assess learner comprehension, learning needs and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or course. Examples include seminars, discussions, homework and projects. Formative assessment helps identify concepts that students struggle with, skills they have difficulty acquiring, or learning standards they have not achieved.

An assessment is not ‘formative’ or ‘summative’ due to its design, but because of its intent. It  identifies in-process teaching and learning modifications or final learning outcomes through scores/grades. So, to distinguish between formative and summative evaluation , it is intent of the evaluation and the expected outcome that is relevant.

The primary differences between formative and summative evaluation are listed in the table:

To distinguish between formative and summative evaluation, let us explore how they vary across different dimensions. These, as per Elise Trumbull and Andrea Lash (‘Understanding Formative Assessment: Insights from Learning Theory and Measurement Theory’, 2013), to provide are:

  • Informal vs. formal
  • Immediate feedback vs. delayed feedback
  • Curriculum-embedded vs. standalone
  • Spontaneous vs. planned
  • Individual vs. group
  • Verbal vs. non-verbal
  • Oral vs. written
  • Scored/graded vs. unscored/ungraded
  • Open-ended vs. constrained/closed response

The main purpose of a formative assessment is providing feedback to the teacher and learner. Summative assessments, which determine a learner’s success, may not be suitable for formative purposes because they do not provide helpful feedback. The frequency and the point of feedback is a key difference between formative and summative evaluation.

Monitoring the learning process and providing feedback at an early stage is vital in any learning strategy. The primary purpose of any form of assessment is to assess learning outcomes from the results.

These results provide information about the gap between a learner’s current understanding and the expected level of understanding. Furthermore, this information at the right time helps the learner identify ways to close the gap.

At times this information gives insight into the learner’s way of thinking about the subject matter. Formative assessments that give more information about learners are ideal to devise outcome-based personalized learning strategies.

To distinguish between formative and summative evaluation, it is useful to consider how actionable the insights are. Compared to summative assessment, formative assessment provides actionable information for teachers and learners. Ideally, the formative assessment gives information about a learner’s progress towards learning goals, thought processes and learning gaps.

Another difference between formative and summative assessment is that formative assessment is continuous. While it helps identify the learner’s weakness, it also helps identify the areas of improvement for the learning material and strategies.

When a standardized test in summative assessment happens at the end of the course, scores may not be available to teachers for some time. So, the results cannot be used to modify lessons or teaching strategies. And these assessments may not give specific information to teachers and learners for their improvement.

Any instructional or assessment activity that helps uncover the way learners think about the topic can serve a formative purpose.

To understand the difference between formative and summative evaluation, let’s take a look at learning progression. Learning progression implies that learning is a process of increasing complexity rather than just a body of content to be covered. Teachers need to know how learning develops to understand a learner’s current status and decide on how to move learning forward.

Learning progressions are stages most learners go through as they progress toward mastering a competency. Understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating or innovating are some of these stages.

Learning progressions help teachers organize the curricular topics.

The design of an assessment helps understand the difference between formative and summative evaluation. Designing an assessment is an essential competence for teachers. There are three elements in any assessment: a model of learner cognition, observations and interpretation.

In summative assessment, these interpretations help decide the subsequent learning path. Effective translation of assessment performance leads to personalized learning, instructional decisions, and actions.

To sum up formative assessment vs. summative assessment , formative assessment methods such as self-assessment and peer-assessment contribute to higher learner achievement. Formative assessments make students take a more serious approach to learn and work harder.

Because of the practical and early feedback mechanism, formative assessment has received growing attention from schools and colleges as well as in corporate training. Formative assessments become integral components of personalized learning.

Thus, teachers and management need to understand the difference between formative and summative assessment to better leverage them depending on their intent and desired outcome.

Combining formative assessment and summative assessment enhances the learning process and helps monitor and measure learning outcomes. Instructors need to consider various ways to combine these approaches for effective delivery.

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Difference Between Formative and Summative Assessment

formative vs summative assessment

On the contrary, summative assessment (SA) is undertaken only at the end of the course or unit.  The primary difference between formative and summative assessment lies in their nature and the frequency of occurrence. Let’s take a look at this article, in which we’ve simplified the difference.

Content: Formative Assessment Vs Summative Assessment

Comparison chart, definition of formative assessment.

A set of formal and informal assessment methods undertaken by the teachers at the time of the learning process is known as Formative Assessment. It is a  part of the instructional process, which is undertaken by the teachers, with an objective of enhancing the student’s understanding and competency, by modifying teaching and learning methods.

Formative Assessment attempts to provide direct and detailed feedback to both teachers and students, regarding the performance and learning of the student. It is a continuous process, that observes student’s needs and progress, in the learning process.

Definition of Summative Assessment

Summative Assessment refers to the evaluation of students; that focuses on the result. It is a part of the grading process which is given periodically to the participants, usually at the conclusion of the course, term or unit. The purpose is to check the knowledge of the students, i.e. to what extent they have learned the material, taught to them.

Summative Assessment, seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of the course or program, checks the learning progress, etc. Scores, grades or percentage obtained to act as an indicator that shows the quality of the curriculum and forms a basis for rankings in schools.

Key Differences Between Formative and Summative Assessment

The difference between formative and summative assessment can be drawn clearly on the following grounds:

  • Formative Assessment refers to a variety of assessment procedures that provides the required information, to adjust teaching, during the learning process. Summative Assessment is defined as a standard for evaluating learning of students.
  • Formative Assessment is diagnostic in nature while Summative Assessment is evaluative.
  • Formative Assessment is an assessment for learning, whereas summative Assessment is an assessment of learning.
  • Formative Assessment occurs on an on-going basis, either monthly or quarterly. On the other hand, Summative Assessment occurs only at specific intervals which are normally end of the course.
  • Formative Assessment is conducted to enhance the learning of the students. Conversely, Summative Assessment is conducted to judge student’s performance.
  • Formative Assessment is undertaken to monitor student’s learning. As opposed to Summative Assessment, aims at evaluating student’s learning.
  • The value of grades of formative assessment is less than the summative assessment, in a sense that grades obtained in FA will tell about the student’s understandability while grades of SA, will determine whether the students should be promoted or not.

The principal difference between these two assessment procedures is that, while the formative assessment is a kind of the instructional process, summative assessment is a sort of grading process. A balanced assessment is based on both the two, that provides necessary information about the next steps of the teachers and to measure student’s learning regarding the content standard.

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December 31, 2017 at 3:07 am

Thanx it was very helpful

Elisabeth Byrd says

June 24, 2019 at 10:46 pm

Informative article.

Robin Goin says

June 25, 2019 at 11:42 pm

Very important information.

August 19, 2019 at 7:36 am

This helps me a lot. Thank you so much.

Renato Lee says

March 25, 2020 at 2:44 am

What is the difference between “review and analysis”?

Brandy Weaver says

April 8, 2020 at 6:53 am

Very helpful. Thank you. Brandy N Weaver

nosipho says

April 18, 2020 at 4:08 pm

It was helpful.

Krissy Ann Thompson says

June 30, 2020 at 7:37 pm

This article was very helpful and pretty straight forward.

Kimberley Devine says

June 28, 2021 at 8:44 am

I wish I would have had access to this article at the beginning of my career, The article was written so teacher-friendly. I saved this article. I am sure I will refer to it again as my career comes to an end. Excellent article! Information

Robert Laube says

June 30, 2021 at 7:08 am

The article is straight forward and teacher friendly. The definitions clarify any misunderstandings anyone should have between the two assessments. I made sure to print this article as I will refer back to it from time to time and will share with my fellow teachers.

Barbara Tiller says

October 11, 2021 at 8:25 pm

This was a great way to understand the importance and difference in summative and formative assessment. The purpose of any assessment is not only to assign a grade but to inform teaching and also evaluate learning that should have taken place. It was also interesting to see the frequency by which assessments both formative and summative should be administered.

Shirley Armstrong says

March 14, 2023 at 8:12 am

I agree with your comment. So true!

AUDRIN MALEYA says

February 17, 2022 at 11:54 pm

The article is well articulated and well defined the English. It is simple and understandable.

David N-yetiwan says

May 21, 2022 at 5:33 am

The article is very concise and precise. I love it

Wilhelmenia Pressley says

June 14, 2022 at 10:35 pm

Very informative information.

March 14, 2023 at 8:10 am

This article was very informative about formative and summative assessment.

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When it comes to evaluating students’ learning, teachers have a wide range of activities and methods at their disposal, although they must be sure to select the type of assessment that fits best with their instructional needs. Here, we present information about three key modes of assessment: diagnostic, formative and summative.

Diagnostic assessment

Diagnostic evaluations are typically short tests given at the beginning and/or end of a course that allow a teacher to gauge what students know about a topic. This information can be particularly useful at the start of a course because the teacher can then plan accordingly and make instructional changes or adjustments to the upcoming course.

This type of assessment does not typically count towards the final grade, and it can also be used as a metacognitive method so that students can become aware of their own knowledge level.

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Diagnostic assessments can come in many shapes and sizes. The most common is a standard quiz or test, and it is crucial to carefully select questions that provide a general overview of the course or topic. Alternatively, students could be required to design a mind map about a topic or participate in a one-on-one interview or group discussion.

Diagnostic assessment can also take the form of problem-solving, although this is a more difficult method to apply, since ascertaining students’ level can be harder when they have been asked to solve a specific problem or situation. When using problem-solving, the teacher should focus on what the students are doing well as they attempt to solve the problem while also identifying areas in which they are lacking.

Formative assessment

Formative assessment sees the teacher carrying out small evaluations frequently during the course to collect evidence of progress or areas of difficulty for each student. The types of assessment used here are typically low-stakes items of work such as quizzes, one-minute reflective writing assignments or group work.

Based on the information gathered, the teacher can provide feedback, try to improve performance, motivate and assist students, as well as make adjustments to teaching strategies if needed.

To give feedback, the teacher can use synchronous sessions in Zoom, Teams or Socrative, or they might record videos or audio with specific recommendations. They can also promote reflection through self and/or peer assessment using Teammates, Google Forms or Survey Monkey.

Some benefits of formative assessment are that it can encourage students to play an active role in their learning process and involve them in metacognition activities. It also promotes self-regulation and strengthens student autonomy at the same time as encouraging interaction between teacher and student.

Summative assessment

Summative assessment is typically carried out at the end of a teaching and learning process and is thus usually seen as the means to measure “how much” a student has learned on the course or module. In many cases, summative assessment takes the form of an original, written piece such as a narrative or analytical essay. Other options include: a performance-based assessment, in which learners are required to carry out an activity or task; oral assessment, where learners create and present an oral piece, such as a speech or presentation; or a standardised assessment, where learners take an exam based on the course or subject.

Benefits of summative assessment are that it provides a final grade for a learner, which is often required by the institution, and also gives learners something to aim for, which can keep them motivated. It can also help teachers identify weaker areas in the learning process and thus understand which topics need more attention based on student outcomes.

Across all three types of assessment a variety of online applications can be used. These include Genially, Wooclap, Google Forms, Quizlet and Socrative; with these apps you can easily create interactive activities, fro m multiple-choice quizzes to crossword puzzles and much more. 

The three different types of assessment are often useful and/or necessary at different points in the learning process to help teachers understand their students’ previous level, the knowledge they have at any given moment or what they have learned by the end of a course. These days, educators can take advantage of a variety of tools such as real-time polls, drag-and-drop interactions, branching dialogue simulations and more.

Finally, remember that it is important to let students know the types of assessment being used, the strategies and instruments through which their learning will be evaluated and how they can/will receive feedback or advice.

Alejandra Govea Garza, Adriana González Nava and Paulo Mendoza Rivera are instructional designers at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, Mexico.

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Formative vs. summative assessment: impacts on academic motivation, attitude toward learning, test anxiety, and self-regulation skill

Seyed m. ismail.

1 College of Humanities and Sciences, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Al-Kharj, Saudi Arabia

D. R. Rahul

2 School of Science and Humanities, Shiv Nadar University Chennai, Chennai, India

Indrajit Patra

3 NIT Durgapur, Durgapur, West Bengal India

Ehsan Rezvani

4 English Department, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran

Associated Data

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

As assessment plays an important role in the process of teaching and learning, this research explored the impacts of formative and summative assessments on academic motivation, attitude toward learning, test anxiety, and self-regulation skill of EFL students in Iran. To fulfill the objectives of this research, 72 Iranian EFL learners were chosen based on the convenience sampling method assigned to two experimental groups (summative group and formative group) and a control group. Then, the groups took the pre-tests of test anxiety, motivation, and self-regulation skill. Then, one experimental group was trained by following the rules of the formative assessment and the other experimental group was taught according to the summative assessment. The control group was instructed without using any preplanned assessment. After a 15-session treatment, the post-tests of the test anxiety, motivation, and self-regulation skill were administered to all groups to assess the impacts of the instruction on their language achievement. Lastly, a questionnaire of attitude was administered to both experimental groups to examine their attitudes towards the impacts of formative and summative assessment on their English learning improvement. The outcomes of one-way ANOVA and Bonferroni tests revealed that both summative and formative assessments were effective but the formative one was more effective on academic motivation, test anxiety, and self-regulation skill. The findings of one sample t -test indicated that the participants had positive attitudes towards summative and formative assessments. Based on the results, it can be concluded that formative assessment is an essential part of teaching that should be used in EFL instructional contexts. The implications of this study can help students to detect their own weaknesses and target areas that need more effort and work.

Introduction

In teaching and learning, assessment is defined as a procedure applied by instructors and students during instruction through which teachers provide necessary feedbacks to modify ongoing learning and teaching to develop learners’ attainment of planned instructional aims (Robinowitz, 2010 ). According to Popham ( 2008 ), assessment is an intended procedure in which evidence of learners’ status is utilized by educators to adjust their ongoing instructional processes or applied by learners to change their present instructional strategies. Assessment intends to improve learning and it is used to reduce the gap between students’ present instructional situation and their target learning objectives (Heritage, 2012 ).

Two types of assessment are formative and summative. According to Glazer ( 2014 ), summative assessment is generally applied to give learners a numerical score with limited feedback. Therefore, summative assessment is commonly used to measure learning and is rarely used for learning. Educators can make the summative assessment more formative by giving learners the opportunity to learn from exams. This would mean supplying pupils with feedback on exams and making use of the teaching potentiality of exams. Wininger ( 2005 ) proposed an amalgamation of assessment techniques between summative assessment and formative assessment. This marriage between summative assessment and formative assessment is referred to as summative-formative assessment. Based on Wininger, summative-formative assessment is used to review the exam with examinees so they can get feedback on comprehension. Formative-summative assessment occurs in two primary forms: using a mock exam before the final or using the final exam before the retake.

Formative assessment allows for feedback which improves learning while summative assessment measures learning. Formative assessment refers to frequent, interactive assessments of students’ development and understanding to recognize their needs and adjust teaching appropriately (Alahmadi et al., 2019 ). According to Glazer ( 2014 ), formative assessment is generally defined as tasks that allow pupils to receive feedback on their performance during the course. In the classroom, teachers use assessments as a diagnostic tool at the termination of lessons or the termination of units. In addition, teachers can use assessments for teaching, by identifying student misconceptions and bridging gaps in learning through meaningful feedback (Dixson & Worrell, 2016 ). Unfortunately, numerous instructors consider formative assessments as a tool to measure students’ learning, while missing out on its teaching potential. Testing and teaching can be one or the same which will be discussed further in this research (Remmi & Hashim, 2021 ).

According to Black et al. ( 2004 ), using formative tests for formative purposes improves classroom practice whereby students can be encouraged in both reflective and active review of course content. In general terms, formative assessment is concerned with helping students to develop their learning (Buyukkarci & Sahinkarakas, 2021 ). Formative assessment can be considered as a pivotal and valid part of the blending of assessment and teaching (Ozan & Kıncal, 2018 ). Formative assessment helps students gain an understanding of the assessment process and provides them with feedback on how to refine their efforts for improvement. However, in practice, assessment for learning is still in its infancy, and many instructors still struggle with providing productive and timely feedback (Clark, 2011 ).

Using the mentioned assessments can positively affect the test anxiety of the students. Test anxiety signifies the extent to which the students experience apprehension, fear, uneasiness, panic tension, and restlessness while even thinking of forthcoming tests or exams (Ahmad, 2012 ). Anxiety can also be regarded as a product of hesitation about imminent events or situations (Craig et al., 2000 ). Test anxiety is the emotional reaction or status of stress that happens before exams and remains throughout the period of the exams (Sepehrian, 2013 ). Anxiety can commonly be connected to coercions to self-efficacy and evaluations of circumstances as threatening or reactions to a resource of stress to continue (Pappamihiel, 2002 ).

The other variable which can influence the consequences of tests or testing sessions in EFL settings is the attitudes of students towards English culture, English language, and English people. Kara ( 2009 ) stated that attitude about learning together with beliefs and opinions have a significant impact on learners’ behaviors and consequently on their performances. Those learners who have desirable beliefs about language learning are willing to rise more positive attitudes toward language learning. On the other hand, having undesirable beliefs can result in negative attitudes, class anxiety, and low cognitive achievements (Chalak & Kassaian, 2010 ; Tella et al., 2010 ). There are both negative and positive attitudes towards learning. Positive attitudes can develop learning and negative attitudes can become barriers to learning because students have these attitudes as they have difficulties in learning or they just feel that what is presented to them is boring. While a negative attitude toward learning can lead to poor performances of students, a positive attitude can result in appropriate and good performances of students (Ellis, 1994 ).

Woods ( 2015 ) says that instructors should regularly utilize formative assessment to advance the learners’ self-regulation skills and boost their motivation. Motivation is referred to the reasons why people have different behaviors in different situations. Motivation is considered as the intensity and direction of the students’ attempts. The intensity of attempt is referred to the extent that students try to reach their objectives and the direction of attempt is referred to the objectives that students intend to reach (Ahmadi et al., 2009 ; Paul & Elder, 2013 ). Motivation is an inborn phenomenon that is influenced by four agents such as aim (the aim of behaviors, purposes, and tendencies), instrument (instruments used to reach objectives), situation (environmental and outer stimulants), and temper (inner state of the organism). To reach their goals, people first should acquire the essential incentives. For instance, academic accomplishment motivation is significant to scholars (Firouznia et al., 2009 ).

Wiliam ( 2014 ) also asserts that self-regulation learning can be a crucial part of a productive formative assessment concerning the techniques of explaining, sharing, and understanding the instructional goals and students’ success and responsibility for their own learning. Self-regulation skill requires learners to dynamically utilize their cognitive skills; try to achieve their learning aims; receive support from their classmates, parents, and instructors when needed; and most significantly, be responsible for their own learning (Ozan & Kıncal, 2018 ). This research aimed to explore the impacts of using summative and formative assessments of Iranian EFL learners’ academic motivation, attitude toward learning, test anxiety, and self-regulation skill. This study is significant as it compared the effects of two kinds of assessments namely formative and summative on academic motivation, attitude toward learning, test anxiety, and self-regulation skill. As this research investigated the effects of the mentioned assessments on four emotional variables simultaneously, it can be considered as a novel study.

Review of the literature

In the field of teaching English as a foreign language, several researchers and experts defined the term “assessment” as a pivotal component of the process of teaching. According to Brown ( 2003 ), assessment is a process of collecting data about learners’ capabilities to conduct learning tasks. That is, assessment is the way instructors use to gather data about their methods and their pupils’ improvement. Furthermore, the assessment process has got an inseparable component from teaching, since it is impossible to think of teaching without assessments. Brown ( 2003 ) defined assessment in relation to testing. The differences between them refer to the fact that the latter occurs at an identified point of time while the former is an ongoing process that occurs regularly (Brown, 2003 ).

Other scholars explained the meaning of assessment by distinguishing it from evaluation. Regarding the difference between the two, Nunan ( 1992 ) asserted that assessment is referred to the procedures and processes whereby teachers determine what students can do in the target language and added evaluation is referred to a wider range of processes that may or may not include assessment data. In this way, then, assessment is process-oriented while evaluation is product-oriented. Palomba and Banta ( 1999 ) defined assessment as “the systematic collection, review, and use of information about educational programs undertaken to improve learning and development” (p.4). All in all, assessing students’ performances means recognizing and gathering information, receiving feedback, and analyzing and modifying the learning processes. The main goal, thus, is to overcome barriers to learning. Assessment is then used to interpret the performances of students, develop learning, and modify teaching (Aouine, 2011 ; Ghahderijani et al., 2021 ).

Two types of assessment are formative and summative. Popham ( 2008 ) said that it is not the nature of the tests to be labeled as summative or formative but the use to which that tests’ outcomes will be put. That is to say, the summative-formative manifestation of assessment does not stop at being a typology but it expands to be purposive due to the nature of assessment. Summative assessment, then, has been referred to as some criteria. Cizek ( 2010 ) suggests that two criteria can define the summative assessment: (1) it is conducted at the termination of some units and (2) its goal is mainly to characterize the performances of the students or systems. Its major goal is to gain measurement of attainment to be utilized in making decisions.

Through Cizek’s definition, a summative assessment seeks to judge the learners’ performances in every single course. Thus, providing diagnostic information is not what this type of assessment is concerned with. Significantly, the judgments made about the students, teachers, or curricula are meant to grade, certificate, evaluate, and research on how effective curricula are, and these are the purposes of summative assessment according to Cizek ( 2010 ).

According to Black and Wiliam ( 2006 ), summative assessment is given occasionally to assess what pupils know and do not know. This type of assessment is done after the learning has been finalized and provides feedback and information that summarize the learning and teaching process. Typically, no more formal learning is occurring at this stage, other than incidental learning that may happen via completing the assignments and projects (Wuest & Fisette, 2012 ). Summative assessment measures what students have learned and mostly is conducted at the end of a course of instruction (Abeywickrama & Brown, 2010 ; Liu et al., 2021 ; Rezai et al., 2022 ).

For Woods ( 2015 ), the summative assessment provides information to judge the general values of the instructional programs, while the outcomes of formative assessment are used to facilitate the instructional programs. Based on Shepard ( 2006 ), a summative assessment must accomplish its major purpose of documenting what learners know and can do but, if carefully created, should also efficaciously fulfill a secondary objective of learning support.

Brown ( 2003 ) claimed that summative assessment aims at measuring or summarizing what students have learned. This means looking back and taking stock of how well that students have fulfilled goals but does not essentially pave the way to future improvement. Furthermore, the summative assessment also known as assessment of learning is clarified by Spolsky and Halt ( 2008 ) who state that assessment of learning is less detailed, and intends to find out the educational programs or students’ outcomes. Thus, summative assessment is applied to evaluating different language skills and learners’ achievements. Even though summative assessment has a main role in the learners’ evaluation, it is not sufficient to know their advancement and to detect the major areas of weaknesses, and this is the essence of formative assessment (Pinchok & Brandt, 2009 ; Vadivel et al., 2021 ).

The term ‘formative assessment’ has been proposed for years and defined by many researchers. A clearer definition is provided by Brown ( 2003 ) in which he claims that formative assessment is referred to the evaluation of learners in the process of “forming” their skills and competencies to help them to keep up that growth process. It is also described as comprising all those activities conducted by instructors or by their learners that supply information to be utilized as feedback to adjust the learning and teaching activities in which they are involved (Fox et al., 2016 ).

Formative assessments aim to gain immediate feedback on students learning through which strengths and weaknesses of students can be diagnosed. Comprehensively, Wiliam ( 2011 ) suggests: Practices in the classrooms are formative to the extent that evidence about students’ accomplishments is elicited, interpreted, and utilized by instructors, students, or their classmates, to decide about the subsequent steps in the education that are probably to be better or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited.

Through this definition, formative assessment actively involves both students’ and teachers’ participation as a key component to develop students’ performance. The assessment for learning, which is based on the aim behind using it, is assessing learners’ progress (McCallum & Milner, 2021 ). Therefore, it is all about gathering data about learners’ achievement to recognize their progress in skills, requirements, and capabilities as their weaknesses and strengths before, during, and after the educational courses to develop students’ learning and achievement (Douglas & Wren, 2008 ).

Besides, Popham ( 2008 ) considered the formative assessment as a strategic procedure in which educators or pupils utilize assessment-based evidence to modify what they are presently performing. That describes it as the planned process that is not randomly occurring. Therefore, formative assessment is an ongoing procedure that provides learners with constructive timely feedback, helping them achieve their learning goals and enhancing their achievements (Vogt et al., 2020 ). Formative assessment is a helpful technique that can provide students with formative help by evaluating the interactions between assessment and learning (Chan, 2021 ; Masita & Fitri, 2020 ).

Some criteria related to formative assessment have been presented by Cizek ( 2010 ). In his opinion, formative assessment attempts to identify students’ levels whether high or low, to provide more help for educators to plan subsequent instruction, to make it easier for students to continue their own learning, review their work, and be able to evaluate themselves. To make learners responsible for their learning and do their research Formative assessment, to Cizek, is a sufficient tool and area for learners and teachers to make proficiency in the learning-teaching process. All in all, concerning specific objectives, formative assessment is a goal-oriented process.

Tahir et al. ( 2012 ) stated that formative assessment is a diagnostic use of assessment that can provide feedback to instructors and learners throughout the instructional process. Marsh ( 2007 ) claimed that formative tests are a type of strategy which are prepared to recognize students’ learning problems to provide a remedial procedure to develop the performances of the majority of the learners. The information that is provided for the learners should be utilized for the assessment to be explained as a formative one. The Assessment Reform Group (ARG) ( 2007 ) explains formative assessment as the procedure to look for and interpret the evidence for instructors and their students to make decisions about where the students fit in their learning, where they need to go, and how best to get there. Kathy ( 2013 ) also argued that formative tests aim to analyze the students’ learning problems to develop their academic attainment.

The theory that is behind our study is the sociocultural theory stating that knowledge is generated in a cooperative way within social contexts. It views learning as a condition wherein learners generate their meanings from the materials and content delivered to them, rather than trying to memorize the information (Vygotsky, 1978 ). Based on sociocultural theory, learning can occur successfully when teachers and students have more interactions with each other.

Some empirical studies are reported here. Alahmadi et al. ( 2019 ) aimed to examine whether a formative speaking assessment produced any effect on learners’ performances in the summative test. Besides, they aimed to observe students’ learning and to provide useful feedbacks that can be applied by educators to develop learners’ achievement and assist them to detect their weaknesses and strengths in speaking skills. Their results indicated that formative assessment helped Saudi learners to solve the problems they encounter in speaking tests.

Mahshanian et al. ( 2019 ) highlighted the significance of summative assessment in conjunction with teacher-based (formative) assessments on the learners’ performances. To do this study, 170 EFL students at the advanced level were chosen and grouped based on the kind of assessment they had received. The subjects in this research were administered exams for two main reasons. First, a general proficiency test was given to put the students at different levels of proficiency. Second, for comparing students’ development according to different kinds of assessments within a 4-month learning duration, an achievement test of the course was administered both as the pre-test and the post-test. The data gained via the scores of the participants on the achievement test received analyses and then compared by utilizing ANCOVA, ANOVA, and t- tests. Based on the outcomes of this research, we can conclude that an amalgamation of summative and formative assessments can result in better achievements for EFL students than either summative or formative assessments discretely.

Imen ( 2020 ) attempted to determine the effects of formative assessments on EFL learners’ writing skills. Indeed, the goal of this study was to recognize the effects of formative assessments on developing the writing skills of first-year master’s students at Abdel Elhamid Ibn Badis University, in Mostaganem. This research also attempted to reveal an essential issue that is the lack of the execution of formative assessments in the writing classrooms. To verify the hypotheses, two tools were applied in this study to gather the data, the teachers’ questionnaire and the students’ questionnaire. The findings of the study revealed that the formative assessment was not extensively used in teaching and learning writing skills, at the University of Mostaganem. The results of both questionnaires showed that if the students were evaluated formatively, their writing skills could be highly enhanced.

Ashdale ( 2020 ) attempted to examine the influences of a particular formative assessment named as Progress Trackers, by comparing a control group that did not receive the Progress Tracker with an experimental group that received the formative-based assessment. The research findings revealed that there were no substantial differences between the experimental and control groups based on the results of the pre-test and the post-test scores. While not statistically significant, the experimental group showed a larger increase in the learners with at least a 60% development in achievement. The lack of significant differences between the experimental group and the control group could be created by the uselessness of the formative assessments or the inability to exclude other factors in the class contexts. This could comprise the uses of other formative assessments applied in both groups, delivery of content, and execution of the formative assessments.

Persaud Singh and Ewert ( 2021 ) investigated the effects of quizzes and mock exams as a formative assessment on working adult learners’ achievement using a quasi-experimental quantitative design. One experimental group received both quizzes and mock exams, another group received mock exams only, and a control group received neither. The data gathered received analyses by utilizing t -tests and ANOVA. The findings indicated noticeable differences in the levels of achievement for the groups receiving formative assessments in comparison to the control participants. The “mock exam” group outperformed slightly than the “quizzes and mock exam” group.

Al Tayib Umar and Abdulmlik Ameen ( 2021 ) traced the effects of formative assessment on Saudi EFL students’ achievement in medical English. The research also tried to figure out teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward formative assessment. The participants involved in this research were 98 students selected among the Preparatory Year learners at a Saudi university. They were assigned to an experimental group and a control group. The experimental students were given their English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses following the formative assessment techniques whereas the control group was trained in their ESP courses by traditional assessment rules. The experimental group teachers were given intensive training courses in Saudi Arabia and abroad on how to use formative assessment principles in the classrooms. At the end of the experiment that continued for 120 days, the control and experimental groups sat for the end of term examination which was designed for all candidates in the Preparatory College. Grades of all participants in the two groups in the final exam were compared. The performance of the experimental group was found to be meaningfully higher than that of the control group. Instructors’ and students’ attitudes towards formative assessment were positive.

Hamedi et al. ( 2022 ) investigated the effects of using formative assessment by Kahoot application on Iranian EFL students’ vocabulary knowledge as well as their burnout levels. This study was conducted on 60 participants who were in two groups of experimental and control. The results indicated that using formative assessment generated significant effects on of Iranian EFL students’ vocabulary knowledge.

In conclusion, the above studies confirmed the positive effects of summative and formative assessment on language learning. Yet, there are a few kinds of research on comparing the effects of the summative and formative assessments on Iranian EFL learners’ academic motivation, attitude toward learning, test anxiety, and self-regulation skill. Most studies in the domain of assessment examined the effects of the summative and formative assessments on the main skills (reading, speaking, writing, and listening) and they did not pay much attention to the psychosocial variables; therefore, this research posed two questions to cover the existing gap.

  • RQ1. Does using formative and summative assessments positively affect Iranian EFL learners’ test anxiety, academic motivation, and self-regulation skill?
  • RQ2. Do Iranian EFL learners present positive attitudes toward learning through formative and summative assessments?

Methodology

Design of the study, participants.

The participants of this research were 72 Iranian EFL students who have studied English since 2016. The male EFL learners were selected based on the convenience sampling method by administering the Preliminary English Test (PET). They were selected from the Parsian English language institute, located in Ahvaz city, Iran. The participants’ general English proficiency was intermediate and their age average was 21 years old. The participants were divided into two experimental groups (summative and formative) and a control group.

Instrumentations

For homogenizing the subjects in terms of general English proficiency, we gave a version of the PET test, extracted from the book PET Practice Test (Quintana, 2008 ). Because of some limitations, only the sections of reading, grammar, and vocabulary of the test were used in this study. We piloted the test on another similar group and allotted 60 min for answering all its items. Its validity was accepted by some English experts and its reliability was .91.

Britner and Pajares’ ( 2006 ) Science Anxiety Scale (SAS) was used as the other instrument to assess the participants’ test anxiety. Some wordings of the items were changed to make them suitable for measuring test anxiety. There were 12 items in this test that required the participants to consider the items (e.g., I am worried that I will get weak scores in most of the exams) and answer a 6-point scale ranging from certainly false to certainly true. Based on Cronbach’s alpha formula, the reliability index of the anxiety test was .79.

The other tool used in this study was the Self-Regulatory Strategies Scale (SRSS) which was developed by Kadıoğlu et al. ( 2011 ) to assess the self-regulation skills of the participants. The SRSS was a 6-point Likert instrument including never, seldom, occasionally, often, frequently, and constantly. The SRSS consisted of 29 statements in eight dimensions. The results of Cronbach’s alpha formula showed that the reliability of the SRSS was .82.

We used the Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMTB) of Gardner ( 2004 ) to evaluate the respondents’ English learning motivation. This measuring instrument had 26 items each with six responses: Highly Disagree, Moderately Disagree, Somewhat Disagree, Somewhat Agree, Moderately Agree, and Highly Agree. We used the Cronbach alpha to measure the reliability of the motivation questionnaire ( r = .87). It should be noted that the motivation questionnaire, the SAS, and the SRSS were used as the pre-tests and post-tests of the research.

The last tool employed in this research was an attitude questionnaire examining the participants’ attitudes towards the effectiveness of summative and formative assessment on their English learning enhancement. The researchers themselves created 17-point Likert- items for this questionnaire and the reliability of this instrument was .80. Likert scale was utilized in the questionnaire to show the amount of disagreement and agreement from 1 to 5 that were highly disagree, disagree, no idea, agree, and highly agree. The validities of all mentioned tools were substantiated by a group of English specialists.

Collecting the needed data

To start the study, first, the PET was administered to 96 EFL learners and 72 intermediate participants were selected among them. As stated previously, the participants were divided into two experimental groups (summative and formative) and one control group. After that, the pretests of test anxiety, motivation, and self-regulation skill were administered to the participants of all groups. After pretesting process, the treatment was conducted on the groups differently; each group received special instruction.

One experimental group was instructed based on the rules of the formative assessment, in the formative group, the teacher (researcher) assisted the students to participate in evaluating their learning via using self and peer assessment. Besides, the teacher’s comprehensive and descriptive elicitation and feedbacks of information about students’ learning were significant in formative class. In fact, there were no tests at the termination of the term and the teacher was flexible concerning the students’ mistakes and provided them with constructive feedback including metalinguistic clues, elicitation, correction, repletion, clarification request, recast, and repletion.

In the summative class, the teacher assessed the students’ learning by giving mid-term and final exams. The teacher did not provide any elaborative feedback, and his feedback was limited to yes/no and true/ false. The control group neither received a formative-based instruction nor a summative-based instruction. The teacher of the control group instructed them without utilizing any preplanned assessments. They finished the course without any formative and summative assessments. After the treatment, the post-tests of the test anxiety, motivation, and self-regulation skill were given to all groups to assess the influences of the intervention on their language achievement. In the final step, the questionnaire of attitude was distributed among both experimental groups to check their opinions about the impacts of summative and formative assessment on their English learning improvement.

The whole study lasted 23 sessions; each took 50 min. In one session, the PET test was administered and in the next three sessions, three pre-tests were conducted. During 15 sessions, the treatment was carried out; in three sessions, three post-tests were given to the participants, and in the last session the attitudinal questionnaire was administered to examine the participants’ attitudes towards the effectiveness of summative and formative assessment of their English learning achievement.

Data analysis

Having prepared all needed data via the procedures mentioned above, some statistical steps were taken to provide answers to the questions raised in this study. First, the data were analyzed descriptively to compute the means of the groups. Second, some one-way ANOVA and Bonferroni tests were used for analyzing the data inferentially. Third, one sample t- test was utilized to analyze the motivation questionnaire data.

Results and discussion

After checking and getting sure about the normality distribution of the data by using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, we used several one-way ANOVA tests and reported their results in the following tables:

As we see in Table ​ Table1, 1 , the mean scores of all groups are almost similar. They got almost equal scores on their anxiety pre-test and the three groups were at the same level of anxiety before conducting the instruction. This claim is verified in the following table with the help of one-way ANOVA.

Descriptive statistics of all groups on the test anxiety pre-tests

According to the Sig value in Table ​ Table2, 2 , there is not a noticeable difference between the test anxiety of all three groups. They were at the same anxiety level at the outset of the study. The inferential statistics show that all the participants had an equal amount of anxiety before they had received the treatment.

Inferential statistics of all groups on the test anxiety pre-tests

As is seen in Table ​ Table3, 3 , the mean scores of all groups are different on the anxiety post-tests. Based on the descriptive statistics, the groups gained different scores on their anxiety post-test and the experimental groups obtained better scores than the control group. This claim is substantiated in the following table by using a one-way ANOVA test.

Descriptive statistics of all groups on the test anxiety post-tests

Table ​ Table4 4 depicts that the Sig value is less than .00; accordingly, one can conclude that there is a noticeable difference between the test anxiety post-tests of all three groups. They were at different anxiety levels at the end of the research. It seems that the experimental groups outdid the control group on the post-test.

Inferential statistics of all groups on the test anxiety post-tests

In Table ​ Table5, 5 , the test anxiety level of all groups is compared. This table shows that there are remarkable differences between the anxiety post-tests of the control group and both experimental groups. Also, this table shows that the formative group outdid the control and summative groups. The formative group had the best performance among the three groups of this study.

Multiple comparisons by Bonferroni test (test anxiety)

a The mean differences are significant at the 0.05 level

As observed in Table ​ Table6, 6 , all three groups’ performances on the self-regulation pre-tests are almost the same; their mean scores are almost equal. We used a one-way ANOVA to check the groups’ performances on the self-regulation pre-tests.

Descriptive statistics of the three groups on the self-regulation pre-tests

In Table ​ Table7, 7 , the inferential statistics of all groups on the self-regulation pre-tests are shown. As Sig (.96) is higher than (0.05), the differences between the three groups are not meaningfully significant. Based on this table, all three groups had the same level of self-regulation ability at the outset of the study.

Inferential statistics of the three groups on the self-regulation pre-tests

The mean scores of the control group, the summative group, and the formative group are, 80.12, 130.04, and 147.25, respectively (Table ​ (Table8). 8 ). At the first look, we can say that both experimental participants outflank the control participants since their mean scores are very higher than the mean score of the control group.

Descriptive statistics of the three groups on the self-regulation post-tests

The results indicate significant differences between the self-regulation post-tests of the groups in favor of the experimental groups (Table ​ (Table9 9 ) . Based on the inferential statistics, the performances of the three groups on the self-regulation post-test are different and the summative group and the formative group outflank the control group.

Inferential statistics of the three groups on the self-regulation post-tests

The outcomes in Table ​ Table10 10 indicate that both experimental groups have better performances than the control group on the self-regulation post-tests. Also, the findings show that the formative group performed better than the other two groups. The treatment had the most effect on the formative group.

Multiple comparisons by Bonferroni test (self-regulation)

The control group’s mean score is 90.33, the mean score of the summative group is 91.75, and the mean score of the formative group is 92.45 (Table ​ (Table11). 11 ). Accordingly, we can say that the three groups had an equal degree of motivation before conducting the treatment.

Descriptive statistics of the three groups on the motivation pre-tests

Table ​ Table12 12 presents the inferential statistics of all groups on the motivation pre-tests. One can see that Sig (.94) is larger than 0.50; consequently, no difference is observed among the groups in terms of motivation pre-tests. The inferential statistics show that the students of the three groups had the same amount of motivation before they had received the treatment.

Inferential statistics of the three groups on the motivation pre-tests

As shown in the Table ​ Table13, 13 , the mean scores of the summative and formative groups are 115.79 and 127.83, respectively, on the motivation post-tests and the mean of the control group is 92.87. It appears that the experimental participants outperform the control participants on the motivation post-tests as their mean scores are higher than the control group.

Descriptive statistics of the three groups on the motivation post-tests

In Table ​ Table14, 14 , the inferential statistics of all groups on the motivation post-tests are revealed. The Sig value (.00) is less than 0.50; therefore, the differences between the groups are significant. Indeed, the experimental groups outperformed the control group after the instruction and this betterment can be ascribed to the treatment.

Inferential statistics of the three groups on the motivation post-tests

The mean scores of the motivation post-tests are compared in Table ​ Table15. 15 . Accordingly, there are noticeable differences between the post-tests of all groups. The formative participants had better performance than the other two groups. We can say that the formative assessment is more effective than the summative assessment in EFL classes.

Multiple comparisons by Bonferroni test (motivation)

As depicted in Table ​ Table16, 16 , the amount of statistic T -value is 63.72, df =16, and Sig =0.00 which is less than 0.05. This implies that Iranian students held positive attitudes towards the effectiveness of summative and formative assessments on their language learning improvement.

One-sample test of the attitude questionnaire

Briefly, the results indicate that both experimental groups had better performances than the control group in their post-tests. The formative group had the best performance among the three groups of this study. Additionally, the results reveal that the participants of the present research had positive attitudes towards the effectiveness of both formative and summative assessments on their language learning development.

After analyzing the data, it was found that all three groups were at the same levels of test anxiety, motivation, and self-regulation skill at the outset of the research. But, the performances of the three groups were different at the end of the investigation. Both experimental groups outdid the control group on their post-tests and the formative group performed better among the three groups. Although both types of assessments (summative and formative) were effective on test the anxiety, motivation, and self-regulation skill of EFL learners, the formative assessment was the most effective one. The findings of the current research also indicated that both experimental groups presented positive attitudes toward the implementation of the summative and formative assessments in EFL classes.

The findings gained in this study are supported by Persaud Singh and Ewert ( 2021 ) who inspected the impacts of formative assessment on adult students’ language improvement. They indicated that there were meaningful differences between the formative participants and the control participants in terms of language achievement in favor of the formative participants. Additionally, our research findings are advocated by Alahmadi et al. ( 2019 ) who explored the effects of formative speaking assessments on EFL learners’ performances in speaking tests. They showed that the formative assessment assisted Saudi EFL learners to solve the problems they encountered in speaking tests.

In addition, our study findings are in accordance with Mahshanian et al. ( 2019 ) who confirmed that the amalgamation of summative and formative assessment can result in better achievement in English language learning. Also, our investigation lends support to the findings of Buyukkarci and Sahinkarakas ( 2021 ) who verified the positive effects of using formative assessment on learners’ language achievement. Additionally, the results of the current research are in agreement with Ounis ( 2017 ) who stated that formative assessment facilitated and supported students’ learning. Our study findings are supported by the sociocultural theory which focuses on the role of social interactions among the students and their teachers in the classroom. Based on this perspective, the learning process is mainly a social process and students’ cognitive functions are made based on their interactions with those around them.

Furthermore, our research results are in agreement with the results of Imen ( 2020 ) who discovered the impacts of formative assessments on EFL students’ writing abilities. His results indicated that using formative assessment develops the participants’ writing skills. Moreover, our research outcomes are supported by the impacts of formative assessments on learners’ academic attainment, opinions about lessons, and self-regulation skills in Ozan and Kıncal ( 2018 ) who performed an investigation on the influences of formative assessments on students’ attitudes toward lessons, academic achievement, and self-regulation skill. They revealed that the experimental class that received the treatment by formative assessment practices had better academic performances and more positive attitudes towards the classes than the control class.

Regarding the positive attitudes of the participants towards formative and summative assessment, our results are in line with Tekin ( 2010 ) who discovered that formative assessment practices meaningfully developed students’ attitudes about mathematics learning. That research indicated that the participants in the treatment group had positive attitudes about mathematics learning. In addition, King ( 2003 ) asserted that the formative assessments enhanced the learners’ attitudes about science classes. Also, Hwang and Chang ( 2011 ) revealed that the formative assessment highly boosted the attitudes and interest of students toward learning in local culture classes.

One explanation for the outperformance of the formative group over the other two groups can be the fact that they received much more input. They were provided with different kinds of feedback and took more exams during the semester. These exams and feedback can be the reasons for their successes in language achievement. This is in line with Krashen’s ( 1981 ) input theory stating that if students are exposed to more input, they can learn more.

The other possible explanations for our results are that formative assessments are not graded so they take the anxiety away from the assessees. They also detach the thinking that they must get everything right. Instead, they serve as a practice for students to get assistance along the way before the final tests. Teachers usually check for understanding if students are struggling during the lesson. Teachers address these issues early on instead of waiting until the end of the unit to assess. Teachers have to do less reteaching at the end because many of the problems with mastery are addressed before final tests. The mentioned advantages can be the reasons for our obtained findings.

In addition, monitoring the students’ learning via using the formative assessment can be the other justification for our results. In fact, monitoring the learning process can provide an opportunity for the teachers to give constructive feedback to their students to improve their language learning. When teachers continuously monitor students’ growth and modify instruction to ensure constant development, they find it easier and more predictable to progress towards meeting the standards on summative assessments. By comprehending precisely what their students know before and during the instruction, teachers have much more power to improve the students’ mastery of the subject matter than if they find out after a lesson or unit is complete.

It is important to point out that when instructors continually evaluate the development of their students and modify their curriculum to assure constant improvement, they find that it is simpler and more predictable to make progress toward fulfilling the requirements on summative assessments. If teachers wait until the end of a session or unit to find out how well their learners have mastered the material, they will have considerably less influence over how well their learners learn the material than if they find out how well their learners have mastered it earlier and during teaching. The value of formative assessment lies in the critical information about student comprehension that it provides throughout the process of learning, as well as the chance it gives educators to provide participants with quick and efficient, and action-oriented feedback, as well as the chance to alter their own behavior so that every respondent has the chance to learn and re-learn the material. Learners whose academic performance falls on the extreme ends of the normal curve, such as those who are struggling and those who excel academically, benefit the most from formative evaluation. These learners have learning requirements that are often one of a kind and highly specialized, and to meet those needs, the instructor needs updated data. In addition, making use of frequent formative evaluation as a means to remediate learning gaps brought up by COVID-19 guarantees that educators can promptly give remediation.

The other justification for our findings can be ascribed to the strength of formative assessments that lies in the formative information they provide about the students’ comprehension throughout the learning process and the opportunities they give to teachers to provide the pupils with action-oriented and timely feedback and to change their own behaviors so that each learner has an opportunity to learn and re-learn. More particularly, using formative assessment can assist the students to detect their own weaknesses and strengths and target areas that need more effort and work. All the positive points enumerated for the formative assessments can be the reasons and explanations for the results gained in the current research.

Moreover, the better performance of assessment groups may be due to numerous reasons. In the first place, consistently evaluating students’ progress helps maintain learning objectives at the forefront of one’s mind. This ensures that learners have a distinct goal to strive towards and that instructors have the opportunity to assist clear up misconceptions before learners get off track. Second, engaging in the process of formative assessment enables instructors to gather the information that reveals the requirements of their students. When instructors have a clear grasp of what it takes for their students to be successful, they are better able to design challenging educational environments that push every learner to their full potential. Thirdly, the primary role of formative assessment that will assist in enhancing academic achievement is to provide both learners and instructors with frequent feedback on the achievement that is being made toward their objectives. Learners can bridge the gap between their existing knowledge and their learning objectives through the use of formative assessment (Greensetin, 2010 ). The fourth benefit of doing the formative assessment is an increase in motivation. Formative assessment entails creating learning objectives and monitoring the progress towards those objectives. When learners have a clear idea of where they want to go, their performance dramatically improves. Fifthly, students must identify a purpose for the work that is assigned to them in the classroom. Connecting the learning objectives with real-world problems and situations draws students into the instructional activities and feeds their natural curiosity about the world. Sixthly, an in-depth examination of the data gathered via formative assessment provides the educator with the opportunity to investigate their own methods of teaching and identify those that are successful and those that are not. It is indeed possible that some of the strategies that work for one group of learners won’t work for another. Lastly, students become self-regulated when they are provided with the tools they need to set, track, and ultimately achieve their own learning objectives. Students may develop into self-reliant thinkers if they are exposed to models of high-quality work and given adequate time to reflect on and refine their own work.

The positive effects of formative and summative assessment on students’ motivation are supported by The Self Determination Theory (SDT) of Motivation which is a motivational theory that provides a way of understanding human motivation in any context (Ryan & Deci, 2000 ). SDT attempts to understand human motivation beyond the simple intrinsic/extrinsic model. It suggests that human motivation varies from fully intrinsic motivation, which is characterized by fully autonomous behavior and “for its own sake” to fully extrinsic motivation, which is characterized by behavior that is fully heteronomous and which is instrumentalized to some other end.

In this study, the self-regulatory skills of the students in the EGs where the formative assessment practices were applied did significantly differ from the ones in the CG where no formative assessment practices were applied. Thus, students’ self-regulation was shown to be improved as a result of formative assessment procedures. Similar findings were observed in the experimental research by Xiao and Yang ( 2019 ) that compared the self-regulation abilities of EG and CG learners in secondary school and discovered a substantial difference in favor of the former group. Research findings based on qualitative data reveal that learners engaged in a variety of cognitive techniques and self-regulatory learning practices. The participants acknowledged that they were an integral part of their own learning and that they accepted personal responsibility for their progress. Teachers reported that learners’ ability to self-regulate improved as a result of formative assessment, which fostered ongoing, meaningful, and learning-effort and performance-focused dialogue between teachers and learners. The students’ progress in the areas of self-regulation and metacognitive abilities, as well as their growth in accordance with educational standards, may be supported by a rise in their success in diagnostic examinations thanks to the use of formative assessment (DeLuca et al., 2015 ). In a study that he conducted in 2015, Woods examined the link between formative assessment and self-regulation. He highlighted that teachers who use formative assessment strategies need to comprehend the participants’ self-regulatory learning processes to make appropriate decisions for their classrooms. Furthermore, Woods ( 2015 ) recommended that educators make regular use of formative assessment to foster the growth of learners’ abilities to self-regulate and to boost the motivation levels of their learners. Wiliam ( 2014 ) also asserted that self-regulatory learning could be an important component of an effective formative assessment in relation to the techniques of explaining, sharing, and comprehending the learning goals and success criteria and students taking the responsibility for their own learning.

It is vital to note that learners who have developed self-regulation skills employ their cognitive abilities; work toward their learning objectives; seek out appropriate support from peers, adults, and authority figures; and, most significantly, accept personal accountability for their academic success. As a result, learners’ abilities to self-regulate have a direct effect on the type of formative assessment based on learning and the applications designed to eliminate learning deficiencies. Self-regulation is an ability that needs time and practice to acquire, but it is possible to do so with the right tools and a continuous strategy. Formative assessment techniques were shown to boost learners’ ability to self-regulate, although this effect was found to be small when the study findings were combined with those found in the literature. This finding may be attributed to the fact that, although formative assessment procedures were implemented for an academic year, they were limited to the context of the social research classroom, and students’ abilities to self-regulate may develop and evolve over time.

The findings of this research can increase the knowledge of the students about two types of assessment. This study can encourage students to want their teachers to assess their performances formatively during the semester. Also, the findings of this study can assist instructors to implement more formative-based assessments and feedback in their classes. This study can highlight the importance of frequent input, feedback, and exam for teachers. An exact analysis of formative assessment data permits the teachers to inspect their instructional practices in order to understand which are producing positive results and which are not. Some that are effective for one group of students may not be effective for another group. The implications of this research can help students try to compensate for their deficiencies by taking responsibility for their own learning instead of just attempting to get good grades. In this respect, formative assessments ensure that students can manage the negative variables such as a high level of examination and grading.

Using formative assessments helps teachers gather the information that reveals the students’ needs. Once teachers have an understanding of what students need to be successful, they can generate a suitable learning setting that will challenge each learner to grow. Providing students and teachers with regular feedback on progress towards their aims is the major function of the formative assessments that will help in increasing academic accomplishment. Formative assessments can help the students close the gap between their present knowledge and their learning objectives. Moreover, using formative assessment gives the students evidence of their present progress to actively monitor and modify their own learning. This also provides the students the ability to track their educational objectives. Also, via using formative assessment, the students have the ability to measure their learning at a metacognitive level. As the students are one of the main agents of the teaching-learning process, instructors must share the learning objectives with them. This sharing can develop the students’ learning in basic knowledge and higher order cognitive processes such as application and transfer (Fulmer, 2017 ). In fact, if learners know that they are expected to learn in that lesson, they will concentrate more on those areas. Formative assessments make the teaching more effective by guiding learners to achieve learning objectives, setting learning needs, modifying teaching accordingly, and increasing teachers’ awareness of efficient teaching methods. Lastly, our findings may aid material developers to implement more formative-based assessment activities in the EFL English books.

In conclusion, this study proved the positive impacts of applying formative assessments on Iranian EFL students’ academic motivation, attitude toward learning, test anxiety, and self-regulation skill. Therefore, teachers are strongly recommended to use formative assessment in their classes to help students improve their language learning. Using formative assessment allows teachers to modify instruction according to the results; consequently, making modifications and improvements can generate immediate benefits for their students’ learning.

One more conclusion is that using formative assessment gives the teacher the ability to provide continuous feedback to their students. This allows the students to be part of the learning environment and to improve self-assessment strategies that will help with the understanding of their own thinking processes. All in all, providing frequent feedback during the learning process is regarded as an efficient technique for motivating and encouraging students to learn a language more successfully. Indeed, by assessing students during the lesson, the teachers can aid them to improve their skills and examine if they are progressing or not. Thus, formative assessment is an essential part of teaching that should be used in EFL instructional contexts.

As we could not include many participants in our study, we recommend that future researchers include a large number of participants to increase the generalizability of their results. We worked on male EFL learners; the next studies are required to work on both genders. We could not gather qualitative data to enrich our results; the upcoming researchers are advised to collect both quantitative and qualitative data to develop the validity of their results. Next researchers are called to examine the effects of the summative and formative assessments on language skills and sub-skills. Also, next researchers are offered to inspect the effects of other types of assessments on language skills and subskills as well as on psychological variables involved in language learning.

Acknowledgements

Not applicable.

Abbreviations

Authors’ contributions.

All authors had equal contributions. The author(s) read and approved the final manuscript.

Authors’ information

Seyed M. Ismail is an assistant professor at Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. His research interests are teaching and learning, testing, and educational strategies. He published many papers in different journals.

D. R. Rahul is an assistant professor School of Science and Humanities, Shiv Nadar University Chennai, Chennai, India. He has published several research papers in national and international language teaching journals.

Indrajit Patra is an Independent Researcher. He got his PhD from NIT Durgapur, West Bengal, India.

Ehsan Rezvani is an assistant professor in Applied Linguistics at Islamic Azad University, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Isfahan, Iran. He has published many research papers in national and international language teaching journals.

We did not receive any funding at any stage.

Availability of data and materials

Declarations.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Contributor Information

Seyed M. Ismail, Email: [email protected] .

D. R. Rahul, Email: moc.liamg@ttinrdluhar .

Indrajit Patra, Email: moc.liamg@0nortengampi .

Ehsan Rezvani, Email: [email protected] .

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  • Professional learning

Teach. Learn. Grow.

Teach. learn. grow. the education blog.

Kathy Dyer

Understanding formative, interim, and summative assessments and their role in student learning

formative vs summative

At its core, education is about the teaching and learning process. How do we teach the necessary literacies, content knowledge, critical thinking skills, ethics, and habits of mind deemed essential to prepare our children for productive, fulfilling, and engaged lives? How do we know whether students have learned what was taught and to what degree? Educational assessment strives to answer these questions, providing valuable insights on the degree to which the teaching and learning process succeeded.

That said, there is often confusion as to what types of assessments are administered when, what data they provide, and how they benefit teachers, students, and parents. Here’s a quick rundown on the three main assessment types and what they are used for.

Formative assessment guides learning

Formative assessment includes sharing learning goals, modeling what success looks like, and giving clear, actionable feedback to students. By design, formative assessment:

  • Has an explicit connection to an instructional unit
  • Consists of many kinds of strategies, and can be as informal as asking a well-crafted question – and using the evidence collected from the question
  • Helps educators guide the learning process, rather than measure student performance
  • Provides students with data they can use to determine where they are in their learning, set goals, monitor their learning progress, and serve as instructional resources for their peers

Summative assessment certifies learning

Generally, educators administer a summative assessment near the end of an instructional unit to help them answer the question, “What did students learn?” All sorts of different assessment instruments are used for summative assessment, including:

  • End-of-unit tests and end-of-course tests
  • Performance tasks/simulations
  • Oral examinations
  • Research reports
  • Standardized state summative assessments

Despite the array of possible summative instruments, it’s the state summative assessments that often come to mind. Federal educational policy requires data collected from these tests to be used for accountability purposes; other high-stakes are associated with summative assessment, such as selection, promotion, and graduation. Legislators also use state summative assessment data to communicate the state of education to the public.

Since summative assessment happens so late in the instructional process, the most effective use of its test data is more evaluative than instructional. For teachers, data can help guide decisions, such as assigning grades for a course, promotion to the next grade, graduation, credit for courses, and more. Summative assessment data also plays a role at the administrative level, where it’s for planning curricula, determining professional development needs, and identifying the resources and federal assistance the district needs to flourish.

Interim assessment guides and tracks learning

A wide middle ground exists between teachers’ day-to-day formative assessment of student learning and the formal protocols of state summative assessment. This middle ground offers opportunities—captured under the umbrella term interim assessment—to gather information about many things that are relevant to the teaching and learning process, including:

  • Individual and collective student growth
  • Effectiveness of teaching practices, programs, and initiatives
  • Projection of whether a student, class, or school is on track to achieve established proficiency benchmarks
  • Instructional needs of individual students

Educators can use interim assessments in a formative way to directly guide instruction. When this happens, data aggregation is considered the key difference between formative and interim assessment. This ability to aggregate data at critical points in the learning cycle allows interim assessment to have a broader set of purposes than both formative and summative assessment. As a result, interim assessment is the only type of assessment that provides educators with data for instructional, predictive, and evaluative purposes.

To understand the value of interim assessment, it’s helpful to understand its variety of purposes. One is to provide educators insight into growth patterns in student learning. Growth can be calculated from student achievement scores taken at logical intervals, such as fall to spring, or fall to fall, or whatever makes the most sense for the local district. Many educators use a fall-winter-spring schedule when administering MAP® Growth™ , our interim assessment. The seasonal system permits enough instructional time between test administrations to be able to calculate growth in learning with statistical confidence.

Another purpose of interim assessment is to help teachers make decisions around differentiating instruction. If the assessment is adaptive, those decisions can better serve all the students in the class—not only those who are ready to learn at grade level. Within any given classroom, teachers will have students who are ready to go deep with concepts, be challenged, and apply and expand their learning. Conversely, there will be other students who need to learn foundational concepts and skills before they’re prepared for grade-level concepts and skills. Interim assessment can help identify gaps so that all students have the opportunity to grow – no matter where they are starting.

These missing foundational concepts and skills may be from the previous grade, or even further back. The gaps provide an enormous challenge for teachers whose only information on their students relates to specific grade-level content. For the students who are ready to be challenged—what are they ready to be challenged by? And for the students who are not prepared to learn grade-level standards yet—where are they?

One way to answer these questions is via an adaptive assessment like MAP Growth . MAP Growth quickly and precisely targets every student’s level of achievement—including students performing at, above, or below grade level. Interim assessment does more than help teachers instructionally. It also supports students in looking at their own growth – where they are and want to go, what their goals should be, and what an action plan for learning looks like. The other purposes of interim assessment are predictive and evaluative. Its data can help educators predict student performance on important markers and evaluate whether teaching strategies, programs, and curricula are effective.

Our blog is full of rich information on both formative assessment and interim assessment, so be sure to have a look around.

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Formative versus Summative Evaluation

Thomas J. Tobin and his colleagues provide this excellent distinction between formative and summative evaluation in chapter 4 of their book,  Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices.  

Formative Evaluations

Formative evaluations are designed to provide information to help instructors improve their instruction. Formative evaluations may be conducted at any time throughout the instructional process to monitor the value and impact of instructional practices or to provide feedback on teaching strengths and challenges. ... This feedback enables instructors to modify instructional activities midstream in light of their effectiveness, impact, and value. Because formative evaluations are designed to guide the teaching process – and are not used as outcome indicators – they are generally individualized evaluations that are under the control of the instructor and target specific instructional issues or concerns. Unlike the more general summative evaluations, formative evaluations may include any targeted attempt to gain feedback for the purposes of enhancing instruction during the teaching and learning process.

Formative evaluations provide the following:

  • Insight on pedagogical strengths and challenges in relation to specific course concepts
  • Guidance to improve teaching strategies
  • A means of monitoring progress or growth in teaching effectiveness
  • Diagnostic information concerning the impact of instructional practices
  • A nonthreatening environment to identify and correct challenges in instruction (Chatterji, 2003)

For formative evaluation to be effective, it must be goal-directed with a clear purpose, provide feedback that enables actionable revisions, and be implemented in a timely manner to enable revisions within the active teaching-learning cycle. Formative evaluations are most effective when they are focused on a specific instructional strategy or concern. Focused formative evaluations produce more specific, targeted feedback that is amenable to actionable change.

Summative Evaluations

Summative evaluations are designed to measure instructor performance following a sustained period of teaching with the focus on identifying the effectiveness of instruction. Summative evaluations provide a means of accountability in gauging the extent to which an instructor meets the institution’s expectations for online teaching. Because summative evaluations are a central component of gauging instructional effectiveness at most institutions, the high-stakes nature mandates that these evaluations are valid and reliable.

Summative evaluations provide the following:

  • Information concerning instructor adherence to teaching expectations
  • A basis for comparing instructor performance to reference groups and external performance criteria
  • A means of determining the effectiveness of instructional activities
  • Objective information for determining course assignments
  • Comparative data to determine employment decisions (continuation, tenure, promotion, etc.)
  • Diagnostic information about strengths and weaknesses in instructor performance
  • Data to determine achievement of departmental or curriculum performance expectations

From  Evaluating Online Teaching: Implementing Best Practices  is available from Jossey-Bass, San Francisco. Copyright © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., A Wiley Company. 

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  3. Difference Between Formative And Summative Assessment(With Table

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  4. What is the difference between formative and summative assessment

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  5. The differences between formative and summative assessment

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  1. Formative vs Summative Assessment

    Carnegie Mellon University ——— Search Search this site only Eberly Center Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation Eberly Center › Assess Teaching & Learning › Basics › Formative vs Summative Assessment What is the difference between formative and summative assessment? Formative assessment

  2. Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

    In the classroom, that means formative assessments take place during a course, while summative assessments are the final evaluations at the course's end. That's the simple answer, but there's actually a lot more that makes formative and summative assessments different.

  3. Formative and Summative Assessments

    Recommendations Formative Assessment Ideally, formative assessment strategies improve teaching and learning simultaneously. Instructors can help students grow as learners by actively encouraging them to self-assess their own skills and knowledge retention, and by giving clear instructions and feedback.

  4. Explainer: what's the difference between formative and summative

    Formative and summative assessments have different purposes and roles in a well-rounded assessment program. Formative assessments provide feedback and support learning progressions, while summative assessments measure and evaluate student achievement. Learn the advantages, disadvantages and examples of each type of assessment.

  5. Formative and Summative Assessments: Examples and Differences

    Learn the definition, purpose, uses, and benefits of formative and summative assessments, two common approaches to assess student learning. See how to employ formative assessments in the classroom and online, and compare them with traditional and performance-based assessments.

  6. Formative And Summative Assessment: The Differences Explained

    Formative and summative assessments are two types of assessment strategies that have different purposes, frequency, types, and outcomes. Formative assessments are low-stakes tests to identify student needs and improve learning, while summative assessments are high-stakes tests to evaluate student progress and performance. Learn how to use both types of assessments in your teaching and learning with examples and tips.

  7. Formative And Summative Assessment: The Differences Explained

    Learn the key differences between formative and summative assessments, how to use them in your classroom, and why they are important for math education. Formative assessments are continuous, informal, and adaptable, while summative assessments are periodic, formal, and against a standard. See examples, tips, and a comparison chart.

  8. Formative vs Summative

    Learn the difference between formative and summative assessment, two types of assessment for learning that have different purposes and goals. Formative assessment is to monitor and feedback student learning, while summative assessment is to evaluate and compare it with a standard or benchmark. Find out how to balance formative and summative assessments in your teaching and learning.

  9. Formative and Summative Assessment

    Formative assessment is used throughout an instructional period to treat misconceptions, struggles, and learning gaps. Summative assessment evaluates learning, knowledge, proficiency, or success at the conclusion of an instructional period. Learn the definitions, examples, recommendations, and strategies/tools for both types of assessments from CELT at Iowa State University.

  10. Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

    Learn the key differences between formative and summative assessments, two types of assessments that teachers and students should use in the classroom. Formative assessments are conducted in the course of learning and measure student progress and understanding. Summative assessments are conducted after learning is complete and measure student retention and achievement.

  11. Formative and Summative Feedback

    Formative feedback can increase student motivation and self-directed learning and help them to become self-directed learners. Examples of formative feedback techniques include many interactive classroom activities, homework and surveys. By way of contrast, summative feedback typically falls at the end of a topic or semester.

  12. Formative vs. Summative Assessment: What's the Difference?

    While formative assessments can take on a wide variety of formats, summative assessments tend to feature a narrower range of question types, such as multiple choice, short answer and essay. Examples of summative assessments include: End of term or semester final exams End of unit or chapter tests

  13. Formative Vs Summative Assessment: 15 Key Differences ...

    Learn the key differences and similarities between formative and summative assessment, two common methods of course evaluation. Formative assessment is an on-going method that focuses on students' progress and feedback, while summative assessment is a traditional method that measures students' performance using a standard or rubric. See examples, advantages, and tools for each method.

  14. Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

    Summative vs. Formative Assessments. The reason why formative and summative assessments are the current hot topic in education is because they represent what we typically mean when we say assessment. They're created by the teachers and used in the classroom to assess students' progress on the subject material. However, the similarities end here.

  15. Formative and summative assessments

    Learn the key differences between formative and summative assessments, two key terms in education assessment. Formative assessments help guide learning, while summative assessments evaluate learning at the end of a period of study. Find out how to use diagnostic, motivational, self-assessment and evaluative assessments for different purposes and purposes.

  16. Formative vs. Summative Evaluations

    Summative evaluations describe how well a design performs, often compared to a benchmark such as a prior version of the design or a competitor. Unlike formative evaluations, whose goals is to inform the design process, summative evaluations involve getting the big picture and assessing the overall experience of a finished product.

  17. Difference Between Formative and Summative Assessment

    Learn the difference between formative and summative assessment across various dimensions, such as intent, feedback, design, and practice. Formative assessment is ongoing, continuous, and provides feedback to improve learning and teaching. Summative assessment is one-time, final, and records scores/grades.

  18. Difference Between Formative and Summative Assessment

    Formative Assessment is an assessment for learning, whereas summative Assessment is an assessment of learning. Formative Assessment occurs on an on-going basis, either monthly or quarterly. On the other hand, Summative Assessment occurs only at specific intervals which are normally end of the course.

  19. Summative vs. Formative: Understanding Their Impact on Learning

    The Main Difference between Summative and Formative Summative vs. Formative: Key Takeaways Summative vs. Formative: the Definition Summative vs. Formative: Usage and Examples Tips to Remember the Difference Summative vs. Formative: Examples Example Sentences Using Summative Example Sentences Using Formative

  20. Diagnostic, formative or summative? A guide to assessment| THE Campus

    Summative assessment is typically carried out at the end of a teaching and learning process and is thus usually seen as the means to measure "how much" a student has learned on the course or module. In many cases, summative assessment takes the form of an original, written piece such as a narrative or analytical essay.

  21. Formative vs. summative assessment: impacts on academic motivation

    Based on Wininger, summative-formative assessment is used to review the exam with examinees so they can get feedback on comprehension. Formative-summative assessment occurs in two primary forms: using a mock exam before the final or using the final exam before the retake.

  22. Understanding Formative, Interim, and Summative Assessments and Their

    A wide middle ground exists between teachers' day-to-day formative assessment of student learning and the formal protocols of state summative assessment. This middle ground offers opportunities—captured under the umbrella term interim assessment—to gather information about many things that are relevant to the teaching and learning process ...

  23. Formative versus Summative Evaluation

    Formative evaluations provide the following: Insight on pedagogical strengths and challenges in relation to specific course concepts. A means of monitoring progress or growth in teaching effectiveness. Diagnostic information concerning the impact of instructional practices. A nonthreatening environment to identify and correct challenges in ...