The Importance Of Differentiating And Combining Formative And Summative Assessment

I believe assessment is important and is the basis of planning for instruction, whether it is diagnostic prior to learning, formative during units or lessons, or summative to evaluate student learning. Rowan’s quote in Every Teacher’s Guide to Assessment, "After all, in the end, the problem is less the idea of testing itself, but how we design them, apply, them, and make use of their data." definitely has an impact on my assessment practices. I feel it is necessary to make sure the student acquires all aspects of the learning. Assessment should be used to bring a value for students. Within my instruction, I implement daily formative assessments which may include turn and share, quick writes, graphic organizers, online discussion responses, KahootIt, and other forms. Designing the appropriate formative assessment to match the lesson is important to assess how the learning is taught and whether the students are showing progress. In addition, I have worked on building blocks of formative assessments in checklist style leading up to the point of reviewing for a summative test. Each of these are checked off as completed and instant feedback is given. Feedback from an assessment is essential to student learning and how a teacher will ensure the content is being acquired.

Assessment is defined as any practice or task that is used to produce information about student learning, and is categorized as either formative or summative (Wallace & White, 2014). There is a distinct difference between the various types of assessments, specifically formative and summative. Formative assessments are informal quizzes that are used to guide instruction

Assessments are vital to the educational process. They provide feedback about what the students know and what they may need to learn in order to obtain the content within a given curriculum. It provides teachers with a glimpse into the student’s readiness on a particular topic or subject. One of the six key principles of having an effective differentiated classroom is having a formative assessment that informs teachers on the effectiveness of their teaching. It also provides teachers with the readiness levels of their students and shows them exactly where the students’ readiness, interests, and learning profile needs really are (Tomlinson, 2014).

The first article that I viewed was on Edutopia and it was titled Why Formative Assessments Matter. This article was a very helpful in that it was a review of what formative assessments are, why they are used, and when and how you use them. The middle part, why they are used, it reinforces that they are used for, to inform, not to punish. This is important to remember as we are assessing and planning instruction for students each day. Learning and showing what you have learned should never feel like a punishment. At the end of the article, in the last section, there were suggestions on ways to formatively assess students in a way that would not feel as though they are being punished. Instead, they are enjoying showing what they have learned. The last tip in this article was to watch, look, and listen. It is important to remember that to formatively assess students you must constantly

Formative assessment provides feedback to teachers and students of their current performance, achievements, strengths and weaknesses

Recently, whenever I hear current teachers discussing about assessing students, ‘Formative Assessment’ is sure to be highlighted. Nowadays this method (formative assessment) is becoming popular among schools and is being applied widely in schools including my own school. Loughland and Kilpatrick (2015) identified in the few past decades, formative assessment has turned out to be the main goal for teachers and educational systems. On the foundation of Loughland and Kilpatrick (2015) findings and from my experience in the field of teaching, I found out nowadays teachers and school stakeholders strongly feel that formative assessment is the best method to assess in order to enhance students’ learning. For these evident reasons, I am interested in finding

When a teacher introduces the idea of formative assessment to a classroom, modifications may need to be made for it to work its purpose. The teacher might need to alter their teaching method and the student will need to be open to changing their learning style to accommodate the change. If both the teacher and students can achieve this, then formative assessment will be successful (al., C. E., 2016). If unsuccessful then formative assessment can be seen by both the teacher and student in a negative light. For example, The Classroom Experiment (Barry, 2010), showcased a range of different formative assessment techniques that can be quite successful in the classroom. One technique that Dylan Wiliam posed was that the teachers give each student

Assessment is an essential part of the teaching and learning process. Assessment is most effective when there is alignment between the outcomes, the design of assessment tasks, the criteria, marking procedures and feedback provided; this referred to as constructive alignment (Potter & Kustra, 2012). The purpose of an assessment, and the modes and strategies used will depend on a number of factors. Diagnostic, formative, and summative assessment are three modes of assessment that may be used. While each of these modes of assessment has a particular purpose, the underlying purpose of all assessments is to promote student learning (Brady & Kennedy, 2012).

Carol Ann Tomlinson’s article, “The Bridge Between Today’s Lessons and Tomorrow”, discusses formative assessments and the role they play in todays classrooms. In many classrooms across America formative assessments are used to raise test scores, rather than as a tool to create open communication between students and teachers. Tomlinson offers educators 10 principles to use and apply formative assessment practices. I believe these principles can be used to increase teacher efficacy with assessment and to increase the communication between teachers and students.

The author, Margaret Heritage, is the assistant director for professional development at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at the University of California, Los Angeles. In this article, Heritage defines formative assessment as a continuous process of gathering evidence of learning.  She continues by stating that formative assessment can typically be enforced within the room with three broad strategies: on-the-fly, planned for, and curriculum embedded. She suggests that four core elements comprise formative assessment: (a) identifying the “gap,” (b) feedback, (c) student involvement, and (d) learning progressions.  She additionally suggests that teachers must have specific knowledge and skills so as

Throughout the duration of the course, one recurring theme was the significance of formative assessment and how it can be used as a platform to guide the students in the process of learning. Yorke (2003) explains that formative assessment is the key towards improving a student’s intellectual development and is constructive towards learning. He continues on by stating that this is acknowledged but “it is not well understood across higher education”. I do agree with this, that Formative assessment is continuous method which is effective in defining if a lesson is outstanding or not and how constructive feedback is useful for both the students and the teachers, one thing which is very significant about formative assessment is that it can be both

Dunn, K. E., & Mulvenon, S. W. (2009). A Critical Review of Research on Formative Assessments: The Limited Scientific Evidence of the Impact of Formative Assessments in Education. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 14(7), 1–11. http://doi.org/10.1002/ir

I knew I was incorporating a mix of formative and summative tests in my class, however I did not remember those terms. Now I have a better understanding of what formative and summative assessments are. Formative assessments provide me with valuable immediate feedback on what my students are learning so that I can improve my

Formative assessments are focused on the sharing of information and teacher-student communication; teachers model how they wish the lesson outcome to appear, students use questions and other learning techniques to get to that point. Formative assessments typically involve open-ended questions, asking students in groups or individually not whether they understand, but to give an example showing they understand. This puts both students and teachers on target for success within the micro and macro learning structure. Summative assessments, in turn, are based on lengthier process after a project, at individual points in a paper, etc. and require

Testing is as much a part of education as attending class, eating in the cafeteria, or going on field trips. Testing is necessary in order to provide feedback relating to student performance. Testing is a vague phrase, however, and for the purposes of this paper, specifically, standardized assessments, formative assessment, and summative assessments will be discussed. Standardized assessments come in two varieties, aptitude tests which predict “how well students are likely to perform in some subsequent educational setting” and achievement tests which are what “citizens and school board members rely on when they evaluate a school’s effectiveness.” (Popham, 1999, p.8) Formative assessments are also known as “assessment for