Formative and Summative Assessments
Formative Assessments:
Frustration and discouragement result when students find their efforts are steering off course or becoming counterproductive. For this reason, periodic formative assessment is needed to help students make midstream corrections (Fisher & Frey, 2007).
Formative Assessments are active monitoring strategies that teachers use to assess student understanding of concepts as they are being presented. These strategies, which include questioning techniques, progress monitoring, observation, thumbs up, and think-pair-share provide feedback on student progress. This feedback enables teachers to gauge student understanding and immediately adjust instruction as needed. We will be covering formative assessments in Topic B of this course.
Summative Assessments:
Summative Assessments measure overall achievement at the end of a meaningful unit of study, and include end-of-topic tests that measure the level of student mastery of the instruction. Although summative assessments may be used for grading and accountability, the true value of the results is to enable teachers to make informed decisions about how to best prepare individual students for the next level of instruction.
Summative assessments also include the end-of-year statewide assessment tests, such as the PSSA, PSSA-M, PASSA, ACCESS for ELLs, and NAEP. These State exams are used for research, evaluation of instruction, and statistical estimates of academic growth and performance. These exams provide a holistic view of the "health" of instruction across the Commonwealth by measuring which goals and objectives of student learning have been met.
In addition to Pennsylvania's summative assessments, students in some grades will take the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) which is an ongoing assessment of what the nation’s students know and can do in science, reading, mathematics, writing, U.S. history, geography, civics, economics, and the arts. NAEP assessments do not report scores for individual students or schools. The NAEP results allow state-to-state comparisons and create a national benchmark for measuring progress. We will be covering summative assessments in Topic C of this course.