Forms and Purposes of Student Assessment

There are generally two sorts of student assessment that are most often discussed within the scholarship of teaching and learning. The first, summative assessment, is an assessment that's implemented at the top of the course of study. Its primary purpose is to supply a measure that “sums up” student learning. Summative assessment is comprehensive in nature and is fundamentally concerned with learning outcomes. While the summative assessment is usually useful to supply information about patterns of student achievement, it does so without providing the chance for college kids to reflect on and demonstrate growth in identified areas for improvement and doesn't provide an avenue for the trainer to switch teaching strategy during the teaching and learning process.

The second form, formative assessment, involves the evaluation of student learning over time. Its fundamental purpose is to estimate students’ level of accomplishment to reinforce student learning during the training process. By interpreting students’ performance through formative assessment and sharing the results with them, instructors help students to know their strengths and weaknesses and to reflect on how they have to enhance over the course of their remaining studies. Pat Hutchings refers to the present sort of assessment as assessment behind outcomes. Formative assessment includes course work—where students receive the feedback that identifies strengths, weaknesses, and other things to stay in mind for future assignments—discussions between instructors and students, and end-of-unit examinations that provide a chance for college kids to spot important areas for necessary growth and development for themselves.

It is important to acknowledge that both summative and formative assessment indicates the aim of assessment, not the tactic. Different methods of assessment can either be summative or formative in orientation counting on how the trainer implements them. Assessing Learners in education, caution against a conflation of the needs of assessing its method. Often the error is formed of assuming that it's the tactic which is summative or formative and not the aim. If a teacher believes that a specific method is formative, he or she may fall under the trap of using the tactic without taking the requisite time to review the implications of the feedback with students. In such cases, the tactic in question effectively functions as a sort of summative assessment despite the instructor’s intentions.