Formative Assessment

Overview

As you work on the assessments and activities appropriate for your course, it is useful to consider the role of formative and summative assessment. One way to define these that might make sense to you:

• Formative assessment is assessment as learning
• Summative assessment is assessment of learning

These two modes of assessment are not in competition, but together provide a solid approach to assessment supporting student learning as a holistic process.

In their book Checking for Understanding Links to an external site., Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey provide a useful table outlining key differences between formative and summative assessment:

Formative assessment often involves students considering or answering metacognitive questions such as:

• What did I learn?
• What questions do I still have?
• How can I apply what I learned?

Examples

The Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning shares some general examples Links to an external site. contrasting the two kinds of assessment:

Implementation

Many of the assessment methods discussed next can be used to implement formative or summative assessment, though simpler assessments and those that can be set up to provide automatic feedback (such as Quizzes) will be most suited to formative assessment.