Recently I was reading a post by Bo Adams from the Connected
Principals Blog about a Ted
Talk given by Pat Bassett. My
instant connection to several of Bassett’s “Big Shifts” urged me to watch the video in
entirety.
Bassett mentions how we are caught up in a world of
summative assessments when we should be moving to one of formative
assessment. In fact he refers to
formative assessments as “the future.”
Bassett is correct; we are engulfed with a focus on
Summative assessments. We live in world
of high-stakes testing. I have heard teachers
from all over mention how they are concerned with how their kids are going to
perform on “the test”. Why wouldn’t
they? It’s highly publicized how each
state ranks compared to one another based off student performance on these
evaluations. Even more so, the media
shares how we rank internationally based on this information.
While both have a place in education, I feel it is necessary
to understand the difference between formative assessment and summative assessment.
Properly using the right assessment in
your classroom will allow your students to perform better on the other
one. This is how I try to keep the two
straight.
Summative Assessment is an evaluation. The word “sum” can be found in its title. This is to remind us that can be
the total learning. It is the state
exam, end of course, SAT, or exam that students take in order to receive a
grade.
Formative Assessments provide information “for” both sets of learners: the
students and the teachers. It’s the
information that helps the students understand where they are with their
learning and where they need to go. They
inform the teacher how to “form” the
instruction to what the student needs.
In other words, the information obtained from formative assessment tells
us what/how we need to teach from that point.
Great learners use formative assessment regularly. I like that Bassett used the word “future”
when describing formative assessment.
Ironic as it may be,
if we just evaluate learning, we won’t have a future.
