These two terms seem to be easily conflated. It’s really simple. Formative evaluation is what you do while you’re building the thing — evaluating it as it’s being formed. Summative is what you do after it’s built and you’ve used it — a summary of how well it worked. The two concepts apply to more than just education. A web designer, for example, might do some user testing for the interface and have some people look over the color schemes while she’s developing a new space. That’s formative. It could be quite a formal evaluation process with a variety of variables under consideration, a lot of data that’s collected, and a whole computer full of statistics that mash up the whole mess. Later, after the space has been implemented and designed, a round of evaluation to determine how well the space achieves its goals.
The key elements here are not how formal or informal the evaluation is. The determinant is when does the evaluation happen.
In our class, you are probably not seeing a lot of the formative stuff. In part, that’s because this course (in various incarnations) is a pretty well-known commodity to me. I’m doing constant formative evaluation by looking at the content and frequency of your posts. I don’t need to ask you how it’s going because i can see it in your weekly work. The process results in things like this post about the differences between formative and summative. My own process of evaluation involves looking at each week as it finishes, and then the cumulative effect over the course. My take in it is that we’re getting tired. It’s been a long slog and we have about a month left. The early days went very well, as you all rose to the challenges I laid out for you. You were able to tie the theoretical stuff back to the early design so you were doing a lot of good, deep processing of the content. You’ve been online — most of you — almost every night I see some of you and it’s often a different crew each evening. The posts have ranged from a tad shallow to absolutely profound. That’s very good. Most discussion board postings don’t get out of the “it had a good beat, I could dance to it” category so we’ve really proven the worth of the technology.
When the class is all over, I’ll be sitting down and looking at the course as a whole. Your blogs, your chats, and your final projects will give me a lot of data about how well the course worked and where it needs work.
October 31st, 2007 at 8:03 am
[...] For most eduators these two terms are second nature, but do you really know what they mean and how to use them? phaedrus » Blog Archive » Formative vs Summative Formative evaluation is what you do while you’re building the thing — evaluating it as it’s being formed. Summative is what you do after it’s built and you’ve used it — a summary of how well it worked. [...]
October 31st, 2007 at 9:51 pm
reading your blog on formative and summative helped me to see how you look at our progress weekly. It also discussed the differences in formative and summative assessments again to let me refresh my memory. Not that I don’t do both, I just don’t talk about them a lot. I feel that if we could look at a students progress weekly instead of how they did on each assignments the students would do better in my class too. At this point I am unsure of how to go about that, but thinking about the student that always understands the work the day after the test or the ones that never seem to do good on the tests but know all the answers in class. If we were able to grade summatively from effort and progress in the class instead of how well they did on a test, that would help illuminate cheating and lots of papers to grade. Now if I can just figure out how to do it. Maybe I could use the blogs about what they learn in class. You have given me something to think about.
November 4th, 2007 at 10:04 am
The formative is about grading actual work for each week and whether it met the requirements for that week. The summative reminds me of Ganley’e approach for assessment. In a class like this I think it is important to look at the whole and reevaluate a student based on overall learning because although a student may have a bad week of blogging that doesn’t mean they missed the mark all together.
November 4th, 2007 at 10:31 am
I attended a math leadership meeting in Lexington, KY on Friday and we viewed a video on assessment. What I liked was how they referred to formative assessment. It was “assessment for learning” versus “assessment of learning.” Often times, teachers are interested in only the final product instead of the development. I am changing my grading methods and adding more checkpoints into my lessons. I am going to give a participation grade for these checkpoints, and use them to decide which students need to be referred to Extended School Services tutoring or paired with another student to increase learning.
November 4th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
[...] Assessing student performance along the way or formative assessment is a good thing for all students. Many students would not pass were it not for the formative assessments along the way. I’ve often heard teachers say things like “How in the world can this student get a B for the 9 weeks, yet fail the final exam?” The reason is because grades are not that good a measure of learning anyway. Students get credit along the way for learning activities such as class participation, homework, projects, etc. That credit is averaged with a score on a summative assessment on which the student may not have done so well. It’s hard to say the cause of the final grade when the student may have actually done all the homework and other projects and may have felt he knew the material, yet bombed the test. On the other hand, the homework could have been copied from someone else and maybe he didn’t really understand anything. It’s sad to say, but I think there are some students who pass, and even make pretty good grades, who don’t understand the concepts. I liked what Pam Callahan said in her response to the post on Phaedrus about what she learned at a math conference. She said “Formative assessment is assessment for learning and summative assessment is assessment of learning.” I also liked that she said she was going to start using the formative assessment to refer students to extended school services or pair them with another student to increase learning. [...]