Is Formative Assessment Better than Summative Assessment for K-12 Education?
Assessments are an indispensable part of the learning and teaching cycle. It not only measures learning outcomes, but also helps make teaching more responsive. Assessment best practices help make it an integral part of the learning cycle, such that both teachers and students are able to monitor learning. For teachers, it offers the means to make data-driven decisions regarding the next steps in teaching and provide support. For students, it offers the opportunity to discover areas of strengths and weaknesses, motivating them towards self-directed learning.
Mindful assessment helps with all of this, while offering timely and individualized feedback. Given that different students have different styles of learning, with each one understanding and assimilating concepts at their own pace, assessment should allow personalized feedback, based on the learning maturity of each student. Some of the key best practices to ensure such assessments is to:
- Integrate assessment into the learning and teaching cycle
- Administer ongoing, regularly paced assessments that help teachers and students monitor themselves.
- Offer teachers the right inputs to plan their instruction.
- Provide regular progress reviews to motivate students in the right direction.
Now, the question arises which style of assessment would best fulfil these needs. The choice is really between summative and formative assessments. Here’s a look.
Summative Assessment
The main objective of summative assessment is to evaluate learning at the end of either an instructional unit or a specific period of time (such as a term or semester), by comparing how each student has fared against a benchmark or standard. These are often high-stakes assessments, such as the SATs, which means that students tend to prioritize them over formative assessments. However, feedback from summative assessments is difficult for both students and teachers to use to guide their efforts to improve performance in future.
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