Summative Assessment Quotes

To die proudly when it is not possible to live proudly anymore. Death, chosen of one's own free will, death at the the right time, with brightness and cheer, done in the midst of children and witnesses, so that it is still really possible to take one's leave, when the one taking leave IS STILL THERE, with a real assessment of what one has achieved and willed, a Summation of life — all the opposite of the pitiful and appalling comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of death.

Assessment OF Learning is summative and used to confirm what learners know and can do so teachers concentrate on ensuring that they have used assessment to provide accurate and sound statements of learners’ proficiency. Assessment FOR Learning provides information about what learners already know and can do so that teachers can design the most appropriate next steps in instruction so the teacher and peers can offer feedback to the learner throughout the learning process. Assessment AS Learning is where learners reflect on their own learning, monitor their progress, and make adjustments to their learning so that they achieve deeper understanding.

Assessment has several roles. The first is diagnostic, to help teachers understand students’ aptitude and levels of development. The second is formative, to gather information on students’ work and activities and to support their progress. The third is summative, which is about making judgments on overall performance at the end of a program of work.

Despite compelling new knowledge about learning, how the brain works, and what constitutes effective classroom groupings, classrooms have changed little over the past 100 years. We still assume that children of a given age are enough like each other that they can and should traverse the same curriculum in the same fashion. Further, schools act as though all children should finish classroom tasks as near to the same moment as possible, and that school year should be the same length for all learners. To this end, teachers generally assess student content mastery via tests based on specific chapters of the adopted textbook and summative tests at the end of designated marking periods. Teachers use the same grading system for all children of a given age and grade, whatever their starting point at the beginning of the year, with grades providing little if any indication of whether individual students have grown since the previous grading period or the degree to which students' attitudes and habits of mind contributed to their success or stagnation. Toward the end of the school year, schools administer standardized tests on the premise that all students of a certain age should have reached an average level of performance on the prescribed content by the testing date. Teachers, students, and schools that achieve the desired level of performance are celebrated; those that do not perform as desired are reprimanded, without any regard to the backgrounds, opportunities, and support systems available to any of the parties. Curriculum often has been based on goals that require students to accumulate and retain a variety of facts or to practice skills that are far removed from any meaningful context. Drill-and-practice worksheets are still a prime educational technology, a legacy of behaviorism rooted firmly in the 1930s. Teachers still largely run "tight ship" classes and are likely to work harder and more actively than their students much of the time.

Assessment is one of the most important tools in personalizing instruction, and one-to-one devices provide opportunities to enhance all forms of assessment. Many large-scale standardized assessments can now be taken with mobile devices, while summative assessments are frequently given online. When teachers and students work together, using mobile devices to conduct formative and benchmark assessments, they can use that information to set personalized goals and strategies, thus planning the most effective, adaptive learning programs.

If teachers perceive the sole purpose of observation to be to receive judgmental feedback, we've created a scenario in which the principal is working hard to engage in summative assessment and teachers feel frustrated by the lack of formative opportunities for growth.

The first kind of feedback relates more to summative assessments, which are the judgments we make about student performance; the second kind relates more to formative assessments, which are the opportunities we provide for students to try their hand at a task and get feedback on it before they are measured for their high-stakes grades.

In rapid remediation, there is a defined timeline, specific goals, and a sense of urgency, making it effective in preparing students for summative assessments or bringing them up to grade level quickly.

Continuous assessments, including both formative and summative evaluations serve to consistently gauge student progress and reinforce learning at various stages of the educational journey.

Rapid remediation is the go-to approach for swift intervention and targeted support for closing learning gaps and propelling struggling students to grasp concepts at an accelerated pace.

Instead of using one exam as the primary summative assessment, he told teachers to use multiple formative assessments along the way—assignments, discussions, observations, and conversations—to inform semester grades. Instead of focusing on getting a grade on a specific exam, he wants students to focus on doing interesting work and teachers to focus on providing meaningful feedback throughout the semester.

When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative: when the guests taste the soup, that’s summative.

If we use a running record at the end of a marking period or instructional unit to measure the level of success, competency, or proficiency that has been obtained at the end of this instructional phase and compare a student’s score against some standard or benchmark, then it is summative.

Formative assessment and summative assessment are compatible, if they focus on the same rich, challenging, and authentic learning goals and if feedback in the midst of instruction leads to internalized understandings and improved performance on culminating, summative tasks. This is not the same thing as adding up points on multiple interim assignments.

More unidimensional classroom structures (whole group instruction, little student choice, frequent summative grading) lead to more perceptions that ability is a normally distributed trait and more student perceptions that some students are smart and some are dumb. In contrast, more multidimensional classrooms (individualized instruction, student choice, less frequent grading) (Rosenholtz & Rosenholtz, 1981; Simpson, 1981) lead to more perceptions that ability is learned and that intelligence can improve.

A generalized finding was that, by and large, teachers lack expertise in the construction and interpretation of assessments they design and use to evaluate student learning (Marso & Pigge, 1993; Plake & Impara, 1997; Plake, Impara, & Fager, 1993), though this referred primarily to constructing, administering, and interpreting summative assessments.