FORMATIVE VS.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT
ALTERNATIVE VS. TRADITIONAL ASSESSMENT

Formative assessment occurs regularly throughout a unit, chapter, or term to help track not only
how student learning is improving, but how your teaching can, too.
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).
Teachers love using various formative assessments because they help meet students’ individual
learning needs and foster an environment for ongoing feedback.
Take one-minute papers, for example. Giving your students a solo writing task about today’s
lesson can help you see how well students understand new content.
Catching these struggles or learning gaps immediately is better than finding out during a
summative assessment.
Such an assessment could include:

 In-lesson polls
 Partner quizzes
 Self-evaluations
 Peer-evaluation
 Ed-tech games
 One-minute papers
 Visuals (e.g., diagrams, charts or maps) to demonstrate learning
 Exit tickets

Summative assessment

Summative assessment occurs at the end of a unit, chapter, or term and is most commonly
associated with a training program, final projects, standardized tests, or district benchmarks.
Summative assessments evaluate student learning, knowledge, proficiency, or success at the
conclusion of an instructional period, like a unit, course, or program.
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
Typically heavily weighted and graded, it evaluates what a student has learned and how much
they understand.
Examples of summative assessment include:
  Mid-term or End-of-term tests
 Final projects or portfolios
 Achievement tests
 Standardized tests

Teachers and administrators use the final result to assess student progress, and to evaluate
schools and districts. For teachers, this could mean changing how you teach a certain unit or
chapter. For administrators, this data could help clarify which programs (if any) require tweaking
or removal.

ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT VS TRADITIONAL ASSESSMENT

Traditional assessment focuses on product of training, learners’ achievement after a period of

instruction, making use of achievement tests, alternative assessment focuses on process of
training, learners’ on-going attempts during the time of instruction (J. D. BROWN and T.
HUDSON (1998).

Traditional assessment tools include Multiple choice tests, true/false tests, short answers, essays.

Alternative assessment tools: three approaches (Simonson et al., 2000) in alternative assessment:
Authentic assessment, performance-based assessment, and constructivists assessment.

In alternative assessment, Huerta-Macías (1995) include checklists, journals, logs, videotapes

and audiotapes, self-evaluation, and teacher observations. JAMES D. BROWN and THOM
HUDSON (1998) added portfolios, conferences, diaries, self-assessments, and peer assessments.

List of positive characteristics for alternative assessments that should appeal to most language
teachers and testers alike:

1. require students to perform, create, produce, or do something;

2. use real-world contexts or simulations;

3. are nonintrusive in that they extend the day-to-day classroom activities;

4. allow students to be assessed on what they normally do in class every day;

5. use tasks that represent meaningful instructional activities;

6. focus on processes as well as products;

7. tap into higher level thinking and problem-solving skills;

8. provide information about both the strengths and weaknesses of students;

9. are multi-culturally sensitive when properly administered;

10. ensure that people, not machines, do the scoring, using human judgment;

11. encourage open disclosure of standards and rating criteria; and

12. call upon teachers to perform new instructional and assessment roles

(JAMES D. BROWN and THOM HUDSON, 1998)

TASK

Instructions: Put the characteristics below into proper columns of

FORMATIVE VS SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT:

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT

1. Occurs throughout a chapter or unit

2. Emphasizes the product of student learning

3. Evaluates what students learn

4. Improves how students learn

5. Covers complete content areas

6. Covers small content areas
7. Monitors how students are learning
8. Focuses on the process of student learning
9. Occurs at the end of a chapter or unit
10. Assigns a grade to students’ understanding
11. Improving
12. Evaluating
13. Little
14. Large
15. Monitoring
16. Grading
17. an assessment for learning
18. an assessment of learning
Formative vs summative assessment

While we just defined the two, there are five key differences between formative and summative
assessment requiring a more in-depth explanation.

Formative assessment Summative assessment

Occurs throughout a Occurs at the end of a

chapter or unit chapter or unit
Improves how students Evaluates what students
learn learn
Covers small content Covers complete content
areas areas
Monitors how students Assigns a grade to
are learning students’ understanding
Focuses on the process Emphasizes the product
of student learning of student learning

During vs after
Teachers use formative assessment at many points during a unit or chapter to help guide student
learning.
Summative assessment comes in after completing a content area to gauge student understanding.
Improving vs evaluating
If anyone knows how much the learning process is a constant work in progress, it’s you! This is
why formative assessment is so helpful — it won’t always guarantee students understand
concepts, but it will improve how they learn.
Summative assessment, on the other hand, simply evaluates what they’ve learned. In her
book, Balanced Assessment: From Formative to Summative, renowned educator Kay
Burke writes, “The only feedback comes in the form of a letter grade, percentage grade, pass/fail
grade, or label such as ‘exceeds standards’ or ‘needs improvement.’”

Little vs large
Let’s say chapter one in the math textbook has three subchapters (i.e., 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3). A
teacher conducting formative assessments will assign mini tasks or assignments throughout each
individual content area.
Whereas, if you’d like an idea of how your class understood the complete chapter, you’d give
them a test covering a large content area including all three parts.
Monitoring vs grading
Formative assessment is extremely effective as a means to monitor individual students’ learning
styles. It helps catch problems early, giving you more time to address and adapt to different
problem areas.
Summative assessments are used to evaluate and grade students’ overall understanding of what
you’ve taught. Think report card comments: did students achieve the learning goal(s) you set for
them or not?

Process vs product
“It’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey”? This age-old saying sums up formative
and summative assessments fairly accurately.
The former focuses on the process of student learning. You’ll use it to identify areas of strength
and weakness among your students — and to make necessary changes to accommodate their
learning needs.
The latter emphasizes the product of student learning. To discover the product’s “value”, you can
ask yourself questions, such as: At the end of an instructional unit, did the student’s grade exceed
the class standard, or pass according to a district’s benchmark?
In other words, formative methods are an assessment for learning whereas summative ones
are an assessment of learning.