Meaningful Summative Assessments
Although their purposes differ, summative and formative assessments should complement each other. The summative assessments that a teacher creates should reflect his or her formative assessments used during instruction. Likewise, the formative assessments should contain information on any standardized summative or benchmark assessments that students will take. This does not mean that a teacher should teach to the test; rather both formative and summative assessments should measure the full-depth of knowledge that students have attained.
An effective summative assessment should accurately measure the course of instruction with questions that are both meaningful and challenging to the students. According to Darling-Hammond (2010), “A critical issue of learning is the extent to which assessments focus on valuable content and generative skills that enable transfer of what is learned to new problems and settings, rather than focusing on lower-level skills of recall and recognition alone” (p. 70).
The Standards Aligned System seeks to develop rigorous criteria for assessments that raises the bar for all students to ensure that they are prepared for academic and professional success. Paradoxically, many students do better with harder questions because they are engaged and required to think. Research shows assignment rigor is positively related to the level of student performance in English/language arts (Shkolnik et al., 2007). Other research shows math assignments that require students to perform problem solving or reasoning, demonstrate conceptual understanding or explain their work, yield higher levels of student work (Shkolnik et al.). The measurement of true rigor is the application of something that a student has learned in a way that shows that they understand how to apply the knowledge to a new situation. In other words, measuring a student's ability to apply extended thinking skills is the true test of student achievement.
Summative assessments provide invaluable information on student progress over a length of time. This paints a picture about the skills and knowledge that students have obtained. The question is how realistic is the picture?