Formative Evaluation and Summative Evaluation

Assessment is vital to the education process. In schools, the most visible assessments are
summative. Summative assessments are used to measure what students have learnt at the end of
a unit, to promote students, to ensure they have met required standards on the way to earning
certification for school completion or to enter certain occupations, or as a method for selecting
students for entry into further education.

But assessment may also serve a formative function. In classrooms, formative

assessment refers to frequent, interactive assessments of student progress and understanding to
identify learning needs and adjust teaching appropriately. Teachers using formative assessment
approaches and techniques are better prepared to meet diverse students’ needs – through
differentiation and adaptation of teaching to raise levels of student achievement and to achieve a
greater equity of student outcomes.

Promoting high-performance: raising levels of student achievement

Formative assessment methods have been important to raising overall levels of student
achievement. Quantitative and qualitative research on formative assessment has shown that it is
perhaps one of the most important interventions for promoting high-performance ever studied.
In their influential 1998 review of the English-language literature on formative assessment,
Black and Wiliam concluded that:

“… formative assessment does improve learning. The gains in achievement

appear to be quite considerable, and as noted earlier, among the largest ever reported for
educational interventions. As an illustration of just how big these gains are, an effect size
of 0.7, if it could be achieved on a nationwide scale, would be equivalent to raising the
mathematics attainment score of an ‘average’ country like England, New Zealand or the
United States into the ‘top five’ after the Pacific Rim countries of Singapore, Korea,
Japan and Hong Kong.” (Beaton et al., 1996, Black and Wiliam, 1998, p. 61)

Building students’ skills for learning to learn

Formative assessment builds students’ “learning to learn” skills by:

  Placing emphasis on the process of teaching and learning, and actively involving
students in that process.
 Building students’ skills for peer- and self-assessment.
 Helping students understand their own learning, and develop appropriate strategies for
“learning to learn”.

Students who are actively building their understanding of new concepts (rather than merely
absorbing information), who have developed a variety of strategies that enable them to place
new ideas into a larger context, and who are learning to judge the quality of their own and their
peer’s work against well-defined learning goals and criteria, are also developing skills that are
invaluable for learning throughout their lives.

THE ELEMENTS OF FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

Element 1: Establishment of a classroom culture that encourages interaction and the use of
assessment tools

The concept of formative assessment was first introduced in 1971 by Bloom, Hastings
and Maddaus. They formally introduced the idea that assessment need not be used solely to
make summative evaluations of student performance, arguing that teachers should include
episodes of formative assessment following phases of teaching. During these episodes teachers
should provide students with feedback and correction as a way to remediate student work. Most
experts now consider formative assessment as an ongoing part of the teaching and learning
process. Formative assessment thus becomes a central element in teaching and learning.

Teachers across the case study schools have integrated formative assessment into their
teaching, establishing classroom cultures that encourage interaction and use of assessment
tools. In each of the case studies, teachers noted the importance of helping students to feel safe
to take risks and make mistakes in the classroom. This is, in part, simply practical: children who
feel safe to take risks are more likely to reveal what they do and don’t understand, an essential
feature of the formative process.
Element 2: Establishment of learning goals, and tracking of individual student progress toward
those goals

Teachers in several of the case study schools worked together to define the standards in
more detail, developing and sharing criteria with colleagues and students, and developing new
internal systems to track individual student progress.

Teachers in the case study schools look to these objective standards to set out learning
goals for students, sometimes scaffolding these goals for weaker students. The teachers have
also moved away from traditional systems of marking – which tend to rely on “social
comparison” of student performance (that is, comparison of each students’ performance with
that of their peers) toward methods that allowed them to track an individual student’s progress
toward the learning goals, as judged through established criteria.

Mischo and Rheinberg (1995) and Köller (2001) also found positive effects in several
experimental and field studies where teachers referred to student progress over time. Positive
effects were identified for students’:

• Intrinsic motivation.
• Self-esteem.
• Academic self-concept.
• Causal attributions.
• Learning [see particularly Krampen (1987)].

The establishment of learning goals and tracking of student progress toward those goals makes
the learning process much more transparent; students do not need to guess what they need to
do to perform well. Teachers also help students to track their own progress and to build
confidence.

Element 3: Use of varied instruction methods to meet diverse student needs

Social and cognitive psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists have
increasingly recognized that the knowledge and experiences children bring to school shape their
learning experiences (Bruner, 1996; Bransford et al., 1999). Such prior knowledge is shaped, in
part, by learners’ ethnicity, culture, socio-economic class, and/or gender. Teachers can help
students learn new concepts and ideas in ways that connect to their prior understandings and
ways of looking at the world. Teachers who are attuned to variations in cultural communication
patterns and sensitive to individual ways of communicating are more likely to draw out what
children understand, and how they develop their understanding of new ideas (Bishop and
Glynn, 1999). Research has found that parents can play an important role here, too, because
they share their children’s life experiences, are well acquainted with their abilities and interests,
and can help their children make connections between ideas (Bransford et al., 1999).

Element 4: Use of varied approaches to assessing student understanding

Teachers in the case study schools use varied approaches to assessing individual student
progress over time, in realistic settings, and in a variety of contexts. Students who may not
perform well in certain tasks have the opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in
others. Such varied assessments also draw out information on students’ ability to transfer
learning to new situations – a skill emphasized as important to learning to learn – and on how
student understanding might be corrected or deepened. These varied assessments may include
tests and other summative forms of assessment, so long as the information on student
performance gathered in the tests is used to inform further learning.

Summative results, when embedded in the wider teaching and learning environment, are
more likely to be used formatively. They also help to lower the stress of tests, which can have a
have negative impact on the self-esteem of lower achieving students (See for example, a study
conducted by the EPPI – Centre at the Institute of Education, University of London, June
2002).

Element 5: Feedback on student performance and adaptation of instruction to meet identified

needs

Feedback is vital to formative assessment, but not all feedback is effective. Feedback
needs to be timely and specific, and include suggestions for ways to improve future
performance. Good feedback is also tied to explicit criteria regarding expectations for student
performance, making the learning process more transparent, and modelling “learning to learn”
skills for students.
Element 6: Active involvement of students in the learning process

Ultimately, the goal of formative assessment is to guide students toward the

development of their own “learning to learn” skills (also sometimes referred to as
“metacognitive” strategies). Students are thus equipped with their own language and tools for
learning and are more likely to transfer and apply these skills for problem solving into daily life;
they strengthen their ability to find answers or develop strategies for addressing problems with
which they are not familiar. In other words, they develop strong “control” strategies for their
own learning.

“Metacognition” involves awareness of how one goes about learning and thinking about
new subject matter and is sometimes referred to as “thinking about thinking”. The student who
has an awareness of how he or she learns is better able to set goals, develop a variety of learning
strategies, and control and evaluate his or her own learning process. As evidence of this, PISA
2000 found that:

“… Within each country, students who use… [metacognitive and control

strategies] more frequently tend to perform better on the combined PISA reading
literacy scale than those who do not (although whether the learning strategies cause the
better results cannot be established). … [T]he strategies are essential for effective self-
regulation of learning because they help students to adapt their learning to particular
features of the task on which they are working. Schools may need to give more explicit
attention to allowing students to manage and control their learning in order to help them
all to develop effective strategies, not only to support their learning at school but also to
help them with the tools to manage their learning later in life”. (OECD, 2001, p. 110)

POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Policy principles of formative assessment to promote wider, deeper and more sustained practice
are to:
 Keep the focus on teaching and learning.
  Align summative and formative assessment approaches.
 Ensure that data gathered at classroom, school and system levels are linked and are used
formatively.
 Invest in training and support for formative assessment.
 Encourage innovation.
 Build stronger bridges between research, policy and practice.

SUMMATIVE TECHNIQUE OF EVALUATION FOR IMPROVEMENT OF LEARNING

PROCESS

This evaluation takes place at the end of the session to measure overall achievement of
pupils. Annual, internal or external examinations are the examples of summative evaluation.
The purpose of this evaluation is to certify fail or pass of the product. If formative evaluation is
related to the process of teaching, it is related to the product of teaching. Here students are
evaluated from the whole syllabus. On the basis of this evaluation, a decision is taken whether a
student should be promoted to the next class or he should be kept in the same class again. In
contrast, summative assessments evaluate student learning, knowledge, proficiency, or success
at the conclusion of an instructional period, like a unit, course, or program. Summative
assessments are almost always formally graded and often heavily weighted (though they do not
need to be). Summative assessment can be used to great effect in conjunction and alignment
with formative assessment, and instructors can consider a variety of ways to combine these
approaches.

Advantages of Summative Evaluation

1. To know if students have understood: A summative evaluation follows certain strategies

for evaluation by means of assignments, tests, projects and more. By these ways, the teacher can
make out if the students have learned and understood the subject. An assignment is said to be a
summative one by the way it is utilized and not by the design of the test, assignment or by self-
evaluation. By this way, the instructor can make out to what degree the students have
understood with the materials that have been taught.

2. They determine achievement: The usual procedure is that summative evaluations are
done at the end of any instructional period. Thus, summative evaluation is considered to be
evaluative in nature rather than being mentioned as diagnostic. The real meaning is that this
evaluation is made used to find out the learning growth and attainment. They are also utilized to
estimate the effectiveness of educational programs. Another key advantage is that they are
utilized to measure the improvement towards objectives and goals. More over course-placement
decisions are also made with summative evaluation.
3. They make academic records: The results of summative evaluations are ones that are
recorded as scores or grades into the students’ academic records. They can be in the format of
test scores, letter grades or report cards which can be used in college admission process. Many
schools, districts, and courses consider summative evaluation as a major parameter in the
grading system.

4. Provides opportunity: The presence of summative evaluation is a motivator as it assists

the individuals and offers them an opportunity to develop a learning environment. This is an
evaluation meant for learning and is based on the outcome.

5. Boosts individuals: The outcome of the summative evaluation is considered as a boosting

factor when it’s positive. With this type of evaluation, confidence is boosted and also, they act as
a springboard to certain behavior change at workplace or institution.

6. Weak areas can be identified: with the help of summative evaluation results, trainers
and instructors can find out weak areas where the results are steadily low. By this way,
alternative methods can be utilized in order to improve the results. New training can be followed
for future events focusing towards success.

7. Training success can be measured: This type of evaluation helps in determining the
success of methods used for training programs used. They are equated with others and
evaluated.

8. Instructional design: The summative design is utilized as an evaluation technique in the

course of instructional design. Depending on the intervention efficiency summative evaluation
offers beneficial information. The value or worth of the intervention is judged by means of
summative evaluation during the conclusion.