What are Formative and Summative Assessments?
When and how to use assessment to support your students.
How do you know your students are learning?
Even if your class is going well, everyone’s happy and there’s a great atmosphere - your students could not be learning anything.
You won’t know until you check.
This ‘check’ is an assessment, and it has two types: formative and summative. To teach effectively, you need to be able to do both.
Unfortunately, many teachers either don’t know when (or how) to do this, which sucks as it means their students aren’t reaching their full potential.
Let’s look at when and how to use each type of assessment.
“When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative assessment. When the customer tastes the soup, that’s summative assessment” - Paul Black
What is formative assessment?
Formative assessment is monitoring your students' learning as they progress through a lesson or unit. It should be an ongoing process that never ends. As long as your students are learning, they’ll struggle at various stages. By checking as you go, you’re able to support that struggle faster and more effectively by adapting if you need to.
But what does formative assessment look like? It could be:
Asking questions to check understanding
Observing your students as they complete tasks
Providing feedback on a draft of an essay
Using ‘exit tickets’ - asking questions as students leave the classroom
Some of these sound a little like error correction - and you might well need to error correct if students are doing something incorrectly - but the idea is to build a picture of your students' abilities. Then, if they’re struggling, help them sooner rather than later. This might mean differentiating, if some students are on track and others need more support.
When to use formative assessment
1. At the beginning of a lesson
Use formative assessment to check your students' prior knowledge and see where they may need support. This can help you personalise the lesson to make it as relevant as possible to them. If they already know everything, push them to learn something new. If they’re behind where you think they should be, spend more time scaffolding and supporting.
2. During a lesson
As you introduce new concepts or skills, check for understanding. You might ask questions, have students complete a short task, or use a quick quiz to see how well they're understanding and using the material.
3. After a lesson
Use what you’ve learned in the class to plan future lessons (and provide targeted support to individual students if needed).
4. Throughout a unit
As you progress through a unit, monitor and adjust your teaching as needed.
5. Before a summative assessment
Before an end of unit test, or similar, use check your students understanding of all areas that will be in the test. Focus on areas that need improvement to prepare them for the test.
What is summative assessment?
When you think of ‘exams’, that’s a classic summative assessment.
Summative assessment is used to check students’ learning at the end of a unit or course. It’s a way to measure what your students have learned and see whether they've met their learning objectives.
Examples of summative assessment are:
Final exams
End-of-unit projects
Portfolios showcasing a student's work over time
The stakes are usually higher, and students are under more pressure because it’s often possible to fail summative assessments.
When should you use summative assessment?
Summative assessment should be used at the end of a learning unit or course to evaluate students' learning. Here’s how that might look at different times:
1. At the end of a unit
Use a test at the end of a unit of learning to see how much your students have remembered and can use. This can help you see whether they're ready to move on to the next unit or if they need additional support.
2. At the end of a course
This is similar to the ‘end of a unit’ but at the end of a course. This can help decide their final grades, and you can then provide feedback on their strengths and areas for improvement.
3. For standardised testing
Use summative assessment to prepare your students for standardised language proficiency tests, such as the TOEFL or IELTS. These tests are often used for academic or professional purposes, so it's important that your students are well-prepared.
When designing a summative assessment, it's important to ensure that it aligns with the learning objectives.
It's also important to provide clear criteria and expectations for summative assessments so that students know what they need to do to be successful.
If you’d like me to write how to design effective assessments (and how AI can also help us do this), email me or leave a comment to let me know!
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