Between formative and Summative Assessments

Formative Assessments(1-2)

Prof/Walid El-Gohary

English supervisor

Defining Formative and Summative

Whenever I do an assessment workshop with a group of teachers, I always start with some definitions so that we’re all talking about the same thing. Almost every teacher I’ve worked with is pretty confident about what the difference is between a formative and a summative assessment.
There are some terrific metaphors that people use. For example, formative assessment occurs when the cook tastes the soup in the kitchen, whereas summative assessment occurs when the patron tastes the soup in the restaurant. Or, formative assessment occurs when I go to the doctor for a physical, whereas summative assessment occurs when I get an autopsy.
What these metaphors help us to see is that summative assessment is the final performance, while formative assessment happens while the student is still learning the concepts and the teacher is able to provide extra time and support to assure all students learn these concepts. It is the formative piece of the process that I like to examine: how to design and write the assessments to make them more diagnostic.

     I find Dylan William’s (2011) definition for formative assessment especially helpful in this regard. He says, “An assessment functions formatively to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers to make decisions about next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have made in the absence of evidence.”

Designing and Writing Effective Formative Assessments

This definition, then, requires the assessment data to include not just which students need extra help but also specific details about what kind of help they need. To do this, the student responses must provide insight into students’ thinking and understanding around specific learning targets, rather than standards.

Consider, for example, this second-grade reading standard: “Ask and answer such questions as who, what, where, why and how to demonstrate understanding of key details in informational text” . In addition to being able to ask questions as well as answer questions about informational text, students need to know what “who, what, where, why, and how” questions are. They must also be able to read and comprehend second-grade text and choose the key details it contains. A formative assessment is designed to identify which of these smaller skills the student might need help with.

When a teacher designs a formative assessment then, he must first unwrap the standard into learning targets and determine the expected proficiency level of those standards . The team then discusses which of the learning targets should be assessed during the learning and how they want to assess it.

In our work, we’ve found that these assessments should be short and focused on only a few learning targets so that the team can respond to students who need help on each of these targets. We’ve also found that when teams use constructed response questions, they often have better insight into what misunderstandings or misconceptions a student has about a target.

How to Use Formative Assessment Data

When teams write quality formative assessments, the data they get back leads them to effective responses. For example, if a team chooses two learning targets to assess and uses one constructed response question for each of these, the resulting data analysis occurs around each of those targets. So, the team starts by identifying which students were proficient on target 1 and which were not proficient on that target. Then they use student work to see if the students who weren’t proficient all had the same misunderstanding or made the same mistake. If so, they plan their response in a way to help students overcome that misunderstanding. If these students had different misunderstandings, they respond to the students in each of these groups differently. They then move on to the second learning target and do the same thing. Thus, they are responding student by student, target by target.