In my last blog I wrote about summative assessment. I began that piece by laying out a series of questions commonly asked by lots of teachers: What is assessment, how does it inform professional practice, what is the difference between formative and summative assessment, why do I need to know any of this stuff anyway, can’t I just continue to teach and test as needed? Is there a professional development connection to this assessment concept?

If you are a faithful reader of this blog series, you may recall, that I lured my readers into an initial discussion about assessment by selecting a provocative excerpt from a fairy tale, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

There was a method to my madness. I used the fairy tale as a hook to engage the reader in a cognitive process, What does this fairy tale have to do with instructional target setting and the collection of evidence regarding student learning?  As we reflect on the fairy tale vignette, what can we glean from Alice’s experience that might help us to more fully appreciate the importance and utility of clear instructional targets and well designed assessment practices?  One could surmise “If you do not know where you are going, any path will get you there."

Yes, my friend, that is the essential point. Once you articulate the path you wish to follow, you need assistance and supports to know if you are still on the right road as your journey begins to unfold. You also need some way to be assured that you ended up where you wished to go at the conclusion of your trip. In order to make these determinations, you will need and want both formative and summative assessments to guide you to a successful conclusion.

In order to make the general case, I offer another non-school extrapolation by way of example; if you take a plane from New York to Oakland, a safe landing at the Oakland Airport is the summative assessment for that particular trip. However, what set of evidence will let you know that you are on target for your final destination as the flight progresses? How does the pilot keep from over shooting the airport by 150 miles?? This is where formative assessment becomes invaluable. He needs a valid and reliable ongoing in-flight process to help him gather relevant information to guide him while your journey is still under way.

Here is the good news, whether you are talking about flying airplanes to Oakland or teaching kids to read in Barre; a formative assessment process can help you collect the necessary evidence you need in order to determine if you should alter or tweak your pre-selected path. In the airplane example, the pilot has an instrument panel that gives him a plethora of information to inform his judgment. He also has a co pilot and an air traffic control system he can utilize to help keep him on course. The key point to note is that this assessment system and the process of providing in flight feedback can only be helpful and fully utilized if the pilot is paying attention and making the necessary adjustments based in what the ongoing evidence is reveling to him. He still has to make meaning of the data in a timely manner!!

On a more concrete level, think of formative assessments as sign post that are strategically positioned along the road to help guide you to your desired destination. Exit signs and mile markers on the interstate serve that function for long distance travel in a car. You can use these guide posts and your GPS system to know how far away you are from your destination, whether you are on the right road etc.

When you go to your doctor for regular office visits and you share information in a transparent and reciprocal manner you are engaging in a formative assessment process with your physician. Both the learner (patient) and the teacher (doctor) contribute to the formative process of keeping you on track to healthy living. If you never see a physician and then you die of a previously undiagnosed disease, the autopsy by the medical examiner confirms your summative state of being, i.e. dead (summative assessment) but it is of little use in altering your unhealthy life style!  

Let’s bring this discussion back around to teaching and learning in an educational context. We can continue to add to our assessment terminology to build a common language to work with: "Summative assessments are assessments of learning that measure many things infrequently. Formative assessments are assessments for learning that measure a few things frequently."

State and provincial assessments are summative assessments: Attempts to determine if students have met intended standards by a specified deadline. They can provide helpful information regarding the strengths and weakness of curricula and programs in a district, school or department and they often serve as a means of promoting accountability. The infrequency of these "end of process measurements" however, limits their effectiveness in providing timely feedback that guides teacher practice and student learning. (Dufour, Dufour, Eaker and Many.)

In a thoughtfully designed comprehensive assessment system, a local school district would use information derived from the state assessments and they would create additional summative assessments that are vertically and horizontally aligned with their valued learning targets (i.e. standards). They would also develop formative assessments that provided them with frequent and robust feedback on student learning inside the instructional process. These assessments would be designed as part of the ongoing collection of evidence as assessment for learning.

The essential point to note at this juncture is that summative assessments are used at the end of an instructional period, (a chapter, a unit, a semester, a year) as part of an evaluation cycle to render a final or summative judgment with respect to a student’s status at that point in time. Summative assessments usually result in a grade or some other form of status ranking (i.e. a level of proficiency etc). Hence they are considered as “after the fact” metrics to determine if learning has taken place now that the instructional process has been concluded. Teachers utilize many forms of summative assessments, such as tests, quizzes, final exams etc to determine a student’s grade in a course.

Teachers and teams can use summative assessments in a “formative manner” to alter future instructional efforts the next time they teach that unit. The noteworthy point to make however is that the summative assessment results come at then end of the instructional cycle and it is too late for the students that generated those results to benefit directly from these data while instruction was still under way!!  Their “game is over” with respect to that unit. Unfortunately a few teachers use summative assessment results as a form of punishment. They hand out the test results and say to their students, “I taught this unit, this is what you earned on your test, perhaps next time maybe you will do a better job preparing for the exam”. Conversely, many other teachers may look at the summative assessment results and say; “I taught this unit, seventy percent of my students earned a D or an F, perhaps I need to redesign this series of lessons and do more formative assessment along the way to be sure the students are mastering the essential skills and knowledge to be successful on my culminating exam”. 

Take a step back and consider what some of the assessment experts have to say on this topic. Wiggins and McTighe (1998) provide a nice conceptual framework to help capture the big ideas in this assessment conversation.

    •    "By assessment we mean the act of determining the extent to which the curricular goals (learning targets) are being and have been attained. Assessment is an umbrella term that we use to mean the deliberate use of many methods to gather evidence to indicate that students are meeting the standards."

If summative assessments are designed to be evidence of assessment of learning, what burden or demand does that place on formative assessment to round out the picture or to complete the puzzle?
Here comes the million dollar news flash…………..formative assessment, assessment for learning is not intended to be used for grading purposes!!! Yes you heard me correctly.

Formative assessments are not tests that come at the end of instruction. Quizzes, short cycle assessments, pre and post tests that result in grades are all mini versions of summative assessment if they are intended to evaluate performance after the fact.

Formative assessment is a process not a test…………………

Formative assessment is a process that takes place while instruction is still under way…….

Formative assessment is designed to provide both the teacher and the learner with necessary and useful feedback during the instructional process in order to help them alter or change the instructional pathway in-flight………

Consider these formal definitions of formative assessment:

Assessment for learning: “Those assessments that happen while learning is still underway. These are the assessments that we conduct throughout teaching and learning to diagnose student needs, plan our next steps in instruction, provide students with feedback they can use to inform the quality of their work, and help students see and feel in control of their journey to success.  Each one reveals to students increments of achievement and how to do better next time. On these occasions the grading function is laid aside”.  (Richard Stiggins)

Formative Assessment:  “Formative assessment is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning to improve students’ achievement of intended instructional outcomes”  FAST/SCASS definition 2006

Formative assessment 2: “Formative assessment is a planned process in which assessment-elicited evidence of students’ status is used by teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures or by students to adjust their current learning tactics.” (A more succinct definition James Popham)

Formative assessment 3: “Formative is a planned process in which teachers or students use assessment based evidence to adjust what they are currently doing.”

(A still more terse definition Popham)

Provocation: As you read these definitions of assessment for and of learning which type of assessment is more like the doctors visit for a “check up” and which one is more like the autopsy report?  Ask yourself, are you nurturing (formative) or burying (summative) your students based on your assessment evidence?

Wrap your head around these definitions and then read my next blog. I want to engage you in a “so what” conversation about this formative assessment topic.

I leave you with this thought…….If we “did assessment” the old fashion way………i.e. like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle might have done, we would do a lot of assessing and very little testing, and the assessing that we did do would be used to adjust our teaching/learning process rather than to grade our students at the end of an arbitrary instructional sequence and then to label most of our students and all our schools as failing.

Bob Stanton