How to assess student progress?
Dasha Bunks
Liberty University
PSYC 775 - Teaching of Psychology
Dr. Winn
2022
Formative and summative assessments are both important and useful but require different
approaches and interpretations.
Explanation
Formative assessments are used to guide and shape classroom instruction directly. Summative
assessments are used to produce an overall judgment of student learning progress or the
effectiveness of educational programs. Formative assessments take place before or during
instruction, can be “on the fly,” and have the explicit purpose of improving current learning.
Summative assessments measure learning at a particular point, usually at the end of a unit of
study, semester, or academic year, and by design provide limited opportunities to influence
current learning activities.
The approach used to collect information is likely to differ between the two types of
assessment as well, given their different purposes. Formative assessments, in the service of
achieving learning goals, are more likely to incorporate learning progressions and include
discussion, collaboration, self- and peer assessment, and descriptive feedback. Summative
assessments, given their purpose of evaluating progress against a benchmark, are more likely to
be high-stakes, standardized large-scale assessments that evaluate individual work to yield an
overall score or performance-level designation. Both formative and summative assessments can
be developed by teachers or those outside of the classroom—for example, by a testing
company on behalf of a state agency. In general, however, formative assessments are more
likely to be developed by teachers, and large-scale, high-stakes assessments are more likely to
be developed by an external organization.
Overall, the goal of both types of assessments is fundamentally the same—to produce valid,
fair, useful, and reliable sources of information.
Relevance for Teachers
Employing formative assessments can result in important increases in student learning when
teachers:
• Clearly communicate to students the purposes of each lesson.
• Use lessons and other classroom experiences to collect evidence on student learning.
• Use this evidence to help understand what students know and promptly redirect students as
needed. Teachers can improve the effectiveness of formative assessments when they:
• Focus systematically on setting goals for their students.
• Determine whether students have met these goals.
• Consider how to improve their instruction in the future.
• Keep the length of time between the formative assessment and subsequent interventions
relatively short; this is when effects on student learning will be strongest. Teachers can make
better use of both formative and summative assessments when they understand basic concepts
related to educational measurement. Teachers can also use assessment data to evaluate their
own instruction to consider whether they adequately covered the material they intended to
cover and whether they were effective in meeting their instructional goals.
Teachers will also want to ensure that their assessments align with overall learning goals to
elicit questions in different ways to assess students’ level of knowledge. Principle 19 provides a
discussion of the importance of validity and fairness in assessments and how they affect the
appropriateness of inferences that may be made from test results. Furthermore, it is important
to consider the length of the test when making important or irrevocable decisions, since test
length is one factor related to the reliability, or consistency, of test results. Principle 20
describes how the meaning of assessment outcomes depends on clear, appropriate, and fair
interpretation of test results.
The meaning of assessment outcomes depends on clear, appropriate, and fair interpretation.
Scores from any assessment should generally be used only for the specific purposes for which
they were designed. For example, tests intended to rank order students for a competition may
be valid, fair, and useful for that purpose, but at the same time these tests would likely be
misleading for determining the strengths and weaknesses of each individual student’s mastery
of material in a particular subject-matter area.
Effective teaching depends heavily on teachers being informed consumers of educational
research, effective interpreters of data for classroom use, and good communicators with
students and their families about assessment data and decisions that affect students. Teachers
can weigh curriculum and assessment choices to evaluate whether those resources are
supported by research evidence and are suitable for use with diverse learners.
To effectively interpret assessment data, teachers should address the following about any
assessment they use:
• What was the assessment intended to measure?
• What comparisons are the assessment data based on? Are students being compared to one
another? Or, instead, are students’ responses being directly compared to samples of acceptable
and unacceptable responses that the teacher or others have provided?
• What are the criteria for cut-points or standards? Are the students’ scores being classified
using a standard or cut-point, such as a pass/fail category, letter grades, or some other
indicator of satisfactory/unsatisfactory performance?
Data gathered from any assessment are best interpreted in light of their suitability for
addressing specific questions about students or educational programs, their appropriateness
for individuals from a variety of different backgrounds and educational circumstances, and the
intended and unintended consequences that result from using the assessment. Because both
higher and lower-stakes tests can have significant impact on students, it is important to make
careful interpretations of the results of either type of test. Awareness of the strengths and
limitations of any assessment is critical. Such awareness also enables teachers to communicate
caveats, such as the imperfect reliability of scores and the importance of using multiple sources
of evidence for high-stakes decisions.
References
Black, P., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B., & Wiliam, D. (2003). Assessment for learning: Putting it into
practice. Buckingham, England: Open University Press.
Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). (2008). Formative assessment: Examples of practice.
Retrieved from the CCSSO website: http://ccsso.org/Documents/2008/Formative
_Assessment_Examples_2008.pdf
Heritage, M. (2007). Formative assessment: What do teachers need to know and do? Phi Delta Kappan,
89(2), 140–145.
Sheppard, L. A. (2006). Classroom assessment. In R. L. Brennan (Eds.), Educational measurement (4th
ed., pp. 623–646). Westport, CT: American Council on Education/
Praeger. Wylie, C., & Lyon, C. (2012, June). Formative assessment—Supporting students’ learning. R & D
Connections (No. 19). Retrieved from the Educational Testing Service website: http://www.ets.
org/Media/Research/pdf/RD_Connections_19.pdf
