A Definition of Formative and Summative Assessments When one thinks of the term assessment, they will most likely think of a test. This is what we know as summative assessment. Summative assessment can be defined as evaluation of student learning at the end of a unit (Formative vs. Summative). For more than 20 years, formative assessment has been highly researched and even accredited as a critical part of a teacher’s pedagogy. In the last decade it (formative assessment has become something of a buzzword and in some cases a mandate in k-12 schools across the country. Formative assessment can be defined as a part of the instructional process intended to gather information and provide feedback for both students and teachers that allow for needed …show more content…
Furthermore, because of the pressure of high stakes testing there have been many negative side effects such as low motivation among teachers and students, test anxiety, lack of creativity in curriculum and teaching to the test (Harlen, 2005). Formative assessments inform instructional practices. If used correctly formative assessments can be an advantage that allows students to know what areas they should study further and what areas they are competent in. It also teachers valuable information that will help them in lesson planning. Again, they key use to use data from the formative assessments effectively. If teachers merely assign an exit ticket with three questions at the end of every class, but they never check them for understanding or use the information to guide instruction, then it is not truly a formative assessment. There is so much research out there on formative assessment. Unfortunately, there is not a great deal of empirical evidence that can directly such as the use of many suggest forms of formative assessment to gains on summative assessments (Dunn & Mulvenon, 2009). …show more content…
Assessments were not aligned and incongruent with what was happening in the classroom. It was difficult to accurately measure student success (Polikoff, Porter, & Smithson, 2011). One of the greatest contributors to the difficulty of aligning assessments to standards is that the standards are so complex (LaMarca, 2001.) How can a single assessment demonstrate mastery of so much content? Also, some assessments items measure multiple standards. This can be difficult to analyze. Furthermore, some assessment contain content that is neither developmentally appropriate for the intended audience or it may content that is not mentioned in the standards (Polikoff, Porter, & Smithson, 2011). This can be discouraging and frustrating for both students and
Elwood, J. (2006). Formative assessment: possibilities, boundaries and limitations. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 215-232, doi:10.1080/09695940600708653
Current educational policy and practice asserts that increased standardized student testing is the key to improving student learning and is the most appropriate means for holding individual schools and teachers accountable for student learning. Instead, it has become a tool solely for summarizing what students have learned and for ranking students and schools. The problem is standardized tests cannot provide the information about student achievement that teachers and students need day-to-day. Classroom assessment can provide this kind of information.
Referred to as “assessment of learning,” (Chappuis, J., Stiggins, Chappuis, S., & Arter, 2012, pg. 5) components of summative learning include evaluating, measuring, and making judgements about student knowledge, both on individual levels and group levels. Rather than supporting learning by way of formative assessment, summative assessment verifies learning, (Chappuis, J., Stiggins, Chappuis, S., Arter, 2012). Naturally, this is what interests educational stakeholders: administrators, parents, teachers, and those who create educational policies. (Chappuis, J., Stiggins, Chappuis, S., & Arter, 2012, pg. 5). Summative assessment historically and presently presents itself in the form of graded quizzes, tests, graded papers and presentations, district benchmark tests, state standardized tests, and college entrance
This method of monitoring and evaluating our academic success has its drawbacks. Standardized testing tends to be corporate run, narrows curriculum, afflicts too much stress on the youth of our nation and is not always fairly scored. Standardized testing should be extremely modified to accommodate everyone and their different strengths, or be eliminated altogether. Scoring on high-risk test has been known to have low and questionable validity. With this irregularity it emphasizes how unjust, unethical and unreasonable subjubjecting students to these test can be.
In addition, a summative assessment will help clarify the effectiveness of the program in terms of whether it was successful for all students or only certain cohorts of students (Raban, 2010). Analytic rubrics were used for summative assessment to assess whether students had achieved the learning outcomes of the unit because they allow for learning outcomes to be assessed independently, making it easier to identify which learning outcomes were achieved and which were not (Bookhart, 2013).
tests were primarily employed as measures of student achievement that could be reported to parents, and as a means of noting state and district trends (Moon 2) . Teachers paid little attention to these tests, which in turn had little impact on curriculum. However, in the continuing quest for better schools and high achieving students, testing has become a central focus of policy and practice. Standardized tests are tests that attempt to present unbiased material under the same, predetermined conditions and with consistent scoring and interpretation so that students have equal opportunities to give correct answers and receive an accurate assessment. The idea is that these similarities allow the highest degree of certainty in comparing result...
Formative assessment works when you as a teacher reflect on your teaching style and methods. Good teachers possess flexibility. (Heritage, Kim, Vendlinski, & Herman, 2009) research addresses the ability to adapt your teaching style to better meet the needs of the students. As a teacher, once you begin assessment for student’s learning you must become like a detective. You gather the evidence to fully understand why a student is not understanding and being an effective learner. Once this happens, you must decide what action is needed, whether it is re-teaching, changing your teaching style/method, or give additional feedback. (Andrade & Valcheva, 2009) stated that re teaching of concepts helped students to address their own misconceptions and helped them to better understand the concept.” As the research demonstrates, your knowle...
However, a formative assessment is ongoing and is used to check for students’ understanding throughout a lesson. Both work samples “matched learning objectives” and I was able to identify the students’ strength and weaknesses. I was also able to “analyze assessment data to understand patterns and gaps in learning” to guide my future instructions. In the word problem assessment, I recognized where the student was struggling and gave “effective and descriptive feedback” to address the area that she needs work in.
Teachers and school administration, have you ever wondered whether the standardized tests you are giving your students is accurately displaying their knowledge? Or whether the material on the test is actually required to know to be successful in each student’s life? It is estimated by Valerie Strauss, from the Washingtons Post, that between kindergarten prep and 12th grade the average American student takes over 112 standardized tests (Strauss, Valerie). This means that students are going through the stress, headaches, and time consuming agony to take around eight or nine tests each school year on top of the tests within each class. People often believe that standardized test correctly represent a student’s academic knowledge and learning and
Standardized testing has become a wide-spread problem to numerous school systems. Many schools have become reliant of tests given at the state level for most students in elementary, middle, high school, and college. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), American College Testing (ACT), Advanced Placement (AP), and many other state tests have become an inadequate way of measuring a students’ achievement. The state does not have as much concern for the other necessities of a child’s learning. Students need further types of evaluation, not only the knowledge and skills needed for one test.
The formative assessment for the learning objectives includes a class discussion, writing a five body paragraph essay and a group discussion. The class discussion assesses a student’s comprehension and their speaking skills. The speaking skills include listening, and pronunciation. Next, the students will be asked to write a five body paragraph essay. Writing an essay allows the teacher to see if the student understands the main points and the character’s development in the story that they had read. Lastly, group discussion allows the students to enhance their social skills. The social skills include if students are able to form a communication with their peers. Also, having a group discussion will allow students to share ideas about the task
1. What is the difference between a. and a. Assessment is a process that aims at setting certain goals and standards that the teacher needs to meet during the teaching process and thereafter gather and analyze evidence from the feedback received from the students to determine if the performance by the students matches the expected goals and standards. Evaluation is a process of collecting data and analyzing it in order to establish if there are any strengths and weaknesses in the strategies used in the teaching process. I found the link between testing, assessing, and teaching most relevant to me. This is because they all supplement and depend on each other.
Cauley, K.H. & McMillan, J.H. (2009). Formative assessment techniques to support student motivation and achievement. Clearing House, 83(1), 1-6.
In spite of the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive proper training on how to design or analyze assessments. Due to this, when teachers are not provided with suitable assessments from their textbooks or instructional resources, teachers construct their own in an unsystematic manner. They create questions and essay prompts comparable to the ones that their teachers used, and they treat them as evaluations to administer when instructional activities are completed predominantly for allocating students' grades. In order to use assessments to improve instruction and student learning, teachers need to change their approach to assessments by making sure that they create sound assessments. To ensure that their assessments are sound they need include five basic indicators that can be used as steps to follow when creating assessments. The first of these indicators and the first step a teacher must take when creating a sound assessme...
Through assessment students and teachers are able to determine the level of mastery a student has achieved with standards taught. Both formative and summative assessment should be purposeful and targeted to gain the most accurate data to drive further instruction (Ainsworth, 2010). While this syllabus does a good job of identifying the need for both formal and informal assessments, the way in which this is communicated does not provide enough detail for understanding. Simply listing assessment types does not give any insight into how these assessments fit in the learning process of this course. While some of the assessments mentioned could be common assessments chosen by the school or district to gain insight into the effectiveness of instruction, the inclusion of authentic assessments is most beneficial to students and demonstrates learning in a context closer to that of a work environment (Rovai, 2004). Unfortunately, this particular course, according to this syllabus, relies heavily on quizzes and traditional tests and essays to form the bulk of assessment opportunities. While other activities, such as formative assessments, journaling and discussions are mentioned as possible avenues for scoring, they are given a very low percentage of the overall grade. This shows that they are not valued for their ability to show progression and mastery. If this is indeed the case, this puts the students as a