3B: Formative vs. Summative Assessment

Many instructors think of assessments as an endpoint, where students show what they have learned (past tense). Chances are that most of the assessments you wrote down in the previous exercise are these types of "endpoint" activities, also called summative assessments. Summative assessments are things like homework assignments, exams, papers or projects; they are typically high-stakes, often resulting in a final grade that is supposed to reflect whether students have learned something.

However, assessments can instead be an important part of the learning process itself. Formative assessments are typically low-stakes activities designed primarily to provide information on whether and how students are learning in order to inform instructor and student behavior. 

Video on formative assessment Links to an external site.

How will you track student progress?

Recall that one of the components of inclusive teaching is being proactive. But in order to be proactive about reaching out to students who need support, you need to know they need support! Formative assessments allow us to see how students are progressing - allowing us, as instructors, to make changes or help as needed - before they reach the summative assessments that measure whether they've reached the goal.

To start thinking about how to use formative assessments, it can be useful to go back to your list of outcomes and the evidence you want students to produce, then try to identify the specific knowledge and skills that students will need in order to be able to produce that evidence successfully. Note that if you did the scaffolding exercise in the previous module to create learning outcomes for individual units or weeks, you may have already incorporated much of this information into those intermediate outcomes.