Categories of Assessments

Formative Versus Summative Assessments

The most common way to categorize assessments is as formative or summative. Formative assessments are those that take place before or during instruction to check student knowledge. These assessments are not graded in a formal way. That is, they are used to give students feedback about their learning and to give teachers feedback about their teaching, not to record grades. For example, we can use formative assessments to help us determine whether we need to reteach material because some of the students have not mastered it. Similarly, formative assessment helps students find out if they understand the material while they are still learning it.

Think of all the ways a teacher might check on student learning informally as they are teaching. You might give the students an ungraded pretest before you start a unit to determine what they already know so you can focus instruction on new material. Then, to check whether students are understanding instruction at it occurs, you can ask questions while you are teaching. Also, giving brief ungraded assessments helps the students, and you, identify gaps in learning. For example, using a tool such as a “ticket out” that asks your students to write about something they learned that day gives you an opportunity to determine whether there is any content you need to reteach during the next lesson.

Formative assessment helps students establish and strengthen neural pathways when we frequently check in with them to make sure they understand new concepts as we are teaching them, and by asking them to use that new knowledge in a variety of ways in classroom activities. [add link here to discussion of this concept in neuroscience chapter]

Summative assessments are those you use at the end of a unit of instruction to evaluate student mastery of the material. Summative assessments include quizzes, tests, exams, portfolios, and performances. Summative assessments are graded, and those grades are used to determine students’ cumulative course grades for formal reports of students’ progress such as school district report cards and transcripts.

As with formative assessments, summative assessments can be viewed as another opportunity for students to learn. As students study for an assessment, they are recalling the material they already learned, strengthening those neural pathways that connect the bits of related knowledge. And then while they are completing the assessment, they will need to retrieve that knowledge from long term memory again, giving them another opportunity to strengthen those pathways and reinforce their knowledge. In this way, assessments not only measure learning, but they also improve it.

Classroom Versus Standardized Assessments

Classroom assessments include any formative and summative assessments you create for your students, as well as assessments teams of teachers in your building/district might develop to be used with all students in a specific grade or subject. These are used to determine if students have mastered certain knowledge or skills.

Standardized assessments are usually developed by test construction experts and are available for use with a broad population. They are generally used to measure certain aptitudes. For example, the SAT is a standardized test used nationwide to predict whether the test taker has the reading, writing, and math skills needed to be successful in college.

These assessments are called standardized because they must be administered, scored, and interpreted using standard methods. Because of this standardization, a student’s score on the test can be compared to others in their age group to determine where they rank in the specific skills or knowledge the test was designed to measure.

Criterion-Referenced Versus Norm-Referenced Assessments

Criterion-referenced assessments are used to determine how much a specific student has learned. Classroom assessments used by teachers to test whether the students in a class have mastered certain knowledge after classroom instruction are criterion-referenced assessments. This is the most common type of assessment and the one you are probably most familiar with taking as a student yourself.

Scores from norm-referenced assessments do not provide information about how much a certain student has learned. Instead, they tell us how well each student performed on the assessment compared to other students of their grade/age. They are called norm-referenced assessments because each student’s score is compared to the “norm,” the average score of all those of the same grade/age who took the test, to determine a rank for the individual student. That norm might be the average of all the students in a school district, a state, a national group, or even an international group of that grade/age. The comparison group can vary.

When you read in the news that educators are concerned about how students in the United States are performing in comparison to students in other countries, they are using results of international norm-referenced assessments to compare the groups.

Learning how to categorize assessments will help you participate in professional discussions of assessments. It will also help you know whether to interpret scores from them as measuring a certain student’s mastery or as a measure of how their level of knowledge compares to other students of their grade/age.

The most important distinction for classroom teachers is formative versus summative assessments. When you design a unit of instruction, you will need to consider when you should simply check in with your students to see the progress they are making in a unit of study and when will you want to administer a more formal assessment to measure student progress and report grades.