summative assessment

20 psychological principles for teachers #18 Formative & summative assessment

2015-06-29T13:55:30+01:00June 29th, 2015|psychology|

This is #18 in my series on the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching and Learning and the first of three posts examining how to assess students' progress: "Formative and summative assessments are both important and useful but require different approaches and interpretations." As I'm sure everyone knows, summative assessments are made to establish what students have learned and to provide a quantitative measurement of achievement. Formative assessments, on the other hand, are intended to establish how students are progressing and provide them with the support needed to arrive at their intended destination. Summative assessment takes place after instruction while formative assessment is [...]

Is there a case for summative assessment?

2013-07-23T08:40:56+01:00September 19th, 2011|assessment|

I've written a lot on the importance of formative assessment recently and feel pretty clear in my own mind of its efficacy. In contrast I see summative assessment as existing only as an external measure of success or failure. I know it exists, and I know it's fairly important to my students' life chances. It's also one of the primary means by which my professional practice is judged, so I'd better take notice of it. This seems like a necessary evil, not something to be celebrated. Cristina Milos and Jennifer Borgioli have challenged this view and asserted that actually, summative assessment [...]

What's the point of assessment?

2011-08-22T12:10:55+01:00August 22nd, 2011|assessment|

Came across an interesting challenge by @purposeducation - #500words campaign, This week the topic is #purposedassess, so here goes... Everyone knows that there's two different types of assessment, right? There's summative assessment which is all about finding out whether students have learnt everything they've been taught. This is the kind of assessment that the media reports on and which schools are judged on. GCSEs, SATs, A levels etc. Then there's formative assessment, or Assessment for Learning as its been rebranded. This is all about finding out what kind of progress students are making. This is (hopefully) what goes on in classrooms [...]

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