Formative and Summative
Assessing student performance along the way or formative assessment is a good thing for all students. Many students would not pass were it not for the formative assessments along the way. I’ve often heard teachers say things like “How in the world can this student get a B for the 9 weeks, yet fail the final exam?” The reason is because grades are not that good a measure of learning anyway. Students get credit along the way for learning activities such as class participation, homework, projects, etc. That credit is averaged with a score on a summative assessment on which the student may not have done so well. It’s hard to say the cause of the final grade when the student may have actually done all the homework and other projects and may have felt he knew the material, yet bombed the test. On the other hand, the homework could have been copied from someone else and maybe he didn’t really understand anything. It’s sad to say, but I think there are some students who pass, and even make pretty good grades, who don’t understand the concepts. I liked what Pam Callahan said in her response to the post on Phaedrus about what she learned at a math conference. She said “Formative assessment is assessment for learning and summative assessment is assessment of learning.” I also liked that she said she was going to start using the formative assessment to refer students to extended school services or pair them with another student to increase learning.
Frequent assessment such as what we have in 685 is very helpful for the student whether online or in the classroom. The student is ultimately responsible for learning and when feedback is given at regular intervals the student can use that information to increase learning. Middle and high school students need more extrinsic motivation to do so and the formative assessment along the way can help to keep them on track. If a student does well on all the formative assessments and then not so well on the summative, the teacher needs to look more closely and figure out why.
