Formative vs Summative Assessment: 7 Differences To Know
Assessments help educators learn what their students know and what they need to learn. Education is not one-size-fits-all. Differentiation and flexibility ensure that every student learns and grows.
That’s one reason multiple types of assessments exist. They each help teachers identify where students are achieving and where they need more practice or support. Today, we’re comparing formative vs. summative assessments and the areas where they differ.
7 differences between formative vs. summative assessments
Learn more about the ways that formative and summative assessments differ in areas like:
1. Purpose
Formative assessments monitor student learning to inform instruction and intervention. They take place while students learn to show teachers how they learn. For example, you may use formative assessments to pulse-check what information or skills resonate with students. Then, you can decide when and how to differentiate instruction, reteach, and review to better clarify a lesson.
Summative assessments give a cumulative overview of student proficiency. They take place after students learn to see what they learned. Summative assessments also impact how you teach by informing long-term curriculum planning.
2. Administration frequency
Teachers build formative assessments into daily instruction. They administer them frequently, sometimes even multiple times in one lesson. For example, you may start a class with a bell ringer, administer a poll in the middle of a lesson, and end with an exit ticket. Summative assessments happen less frequently. They come at the end of a unit, term, or school year.
3. Length
Formative assessments are shorter than summative assessments and cover less material. For example, a bell ringer or exit ticket typically has three questions or less to quickly transition students into or out of a lesson.
Summative assessments are longer because they cover more material. Depending on their length, summative assessments may take students an entire class period to complete. State and standardized testing periods often last at least a week to ensure students have enough time to finish them.
4. Results frequency
You can get results from formative assessments instantly. That’s why they’re so helpful for adjusting daily instruction. With in-the-moment results, you can identify areas where students need help and pivot instruction to address them. These real-time responses accelerate the feedback loop and eliminate confusion that can lead to knowledge gaps later in a unit.
Since summative assessments happen less frequently, their results come less frequently, too. You get these results only after the unit, term, or school year is over. Summative assessments are great for high-level snapshots of student performance, but they don’t give the fast-cycle feedback to power real-time instruction, feedback, and student learning growth.
5. Data collection and analysis
Formative assessments help you analyze individual and class-wide performance. Because they help direct instruction, the data you get from formative assessments helps you understand what’s happening in the moment. By analyzing class-wide formative assessment data, you can recognize common misconceptions and adjust instructional pacing to move past concepts students have already mastered. Plus, formative assessment data gives you a quick overview of the comprehension or abilities of the class as a whole.
Summative assessment data helps you evaluate student proficiency across the larger population. For example, one third-grade teacher could see how their class performance compares to other third-grade classes in the school or district. State summative assessments take this analysis to a greater level by looking at how individuals or a group of students compare to others their age across the state or country.
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6. Formality and flexibility
Formative assessments are more informal than summative assessments. They’re lower stakes, typically not formally graded, and embedded into lessons at key points to help you check student understanding of the material. Because they’re informal, you can be more flexible with the format.
For example, students may play a warm-up game together at the beginning of class to test their knowledge of the next lesson topic. The goal of this formative assessment isn’t to test that students know the “right” answer. It’s to find out what students know or don’t know and tailor your lesson accordingly.
Summative assessments are more formal. They’re higher stakes and almost always count for a grade, or their results show student progress and performance over the year. They’re administered in a more traditional testing format, too. This means you typically give summative assessments in a quiet, non-disruptive classroom environment, ask students to work independently, and put a time limit on the test. There typically isn’t much room for flexibility with summative assessments.
7. Formats
Formative and summative assessments often take different formats. Formative assessments include formats like polls, student reflections, or checks for understanding. Summative assessments are usually traditional chapter, unit, or state tests. They use various question types, such as short-answer, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blank, to collect student responses.
Performance tasks, or activities where students show what they know by producing a tangible product or performance, are a type of both formative and summative assessment. The complexity of the project distinguishes one from the other. Summative performance tasks often require more time and attention, and students may work on them inside and outside the classroom.
For example, a formative performance task may ask students to draw a picture of their prediction about what happens at the end of a story. You could administer this assessment in the middle of class and have students complete it before reading the ending. In contrast, a summative performance task may be something like a book report or a diorama project that requires students to consider everything they learned while reading a book.
How do common assessments fit in?
Both formative and summative assessments can also be common assessments. When an assessment is common, it’s administered the same way to all students across a grade, school, or district.
Features of common assessments include standardizing the questions, answer choices, and grading scale, and controlling how or when you administer the test. Common assessments also let you evaluate data consistently. The apples-to-apples comparisons help you find patterns and set benchmarks based on student data because you collect data in a controlled, consistent way.
The difference between formative and summative common assessments is the same as general formative and summative assessments. Common formative assessments happen more frequently and inform instruction and intervention. Common summative assessments happen less frequently and evaluate student proficiency across a class, school, or district.
Formative or summative assessments: Which are better?
Formative and summative assessments each have a critical role to play in helping you monitor student performance. It wouldn’t be right, or fair, to compare them head-to-head and say which is “better.” Instead, it’s important to have a comprehensive assessment strategy that includes formative, summative, and interim assessments to check students’ performance at every stage of their learning journey.
The right assessment tools are also important to make data collection and analysis easier. The right tools ensure you have all the information you need to draw the right conclusions, adjust instruction, and plan for the future state of education in your classroom, school, or district.
Make Formative your go-to assessment tool
Formative has all the features you need to support your balanced assessment strategy. From daily instruction and formative assessments to common administration and higher-stakes tests, you can take advantage of things like:
20+ question and content types, including multi-select, matching, show your work, and more, to keep students engaged and offer a variety of ways to show knowledge.
Real-time data to help you meet students where they are and give them time, targeted feedback.
Standard question tagging and common assessment performance and standards progress overview reports to identify opportunities for improvement or reteaching.
One tracker page with student responses to enable easy batch assignment grading.
The Respondus LockDown Browser add-on for district-wide subscriptions, to support a secure testing environment.
The Formative Item Bank add-on for district-wide subscriptions, with over 90,000+ vetted state standards-aligned assessment questions for ELA, social studies, science, and math.
Want access to the Respondus LockDown Browser or Formative Item Bank? Contact our support team so we can let your admin know you’d like to add it to your district-wide subscription.
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