Formative assessment

It is critical that students understand their role in a formative assessment classroom environment. Student behaviors include:

  1. engaging with learning goals,
  2. developing success criteria,
  3. providing feedback to peers,
  4. receiving feedback from teachers and peers.

Untitled

The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments:

Formative assessments are generally low stakes, which means that they have low or no point value.


When students do their homework and participate on a ongoing regular basis, they have the opportunity to be wrong and make mistakes without the fear of loosing marks.

"Oh, I thought..."

"I misread that..."

"That's not what I meant..."

"I did not understand..."

"I did not know that's what you meant..."

This focus on improvement and validating their understanding, helps them in self-assessing their mastery.

Summative assessment

The definition of summative assessment is any method of evaluation performed at the end of a unit that allows a teacher to measure a student's understanding, typically against standardized criteria. The purpose of summative assessment is to gauge students' comprehension of the material presented at the end of a particular unit of work, and is often measured with a grade or percentage, depending on the subject.

Summative assessment is a way of determining how well the material was learned after an instructional period has been completed. There are three components of summative assessment to remember. First, there is the purpose component. Second, there is the benchmarking component. Third, there is the high stakes component.