I received a nice query by email the other day and I thought readers might find my reply helpful.
Within my district there is quite a debate going on about the difference between formative and summative assessments. Specifically, the administration in my school district has developed a common syllabus for our teachers this year which states that 30% of a student’s grade should be made up of formative assessments (homework, journals, etc.) and the remaining 70% should be made up of summative assessments (quizzes, tests, exams). I am on the side that is arguing that a formative assessment should never be graded – it is supposed to be used as a tool to evaluate teaching so that adjustments can be made to instruction.
I write you in hopes of getting a clear and concise definition of a formative assessment. Can they be graded? If so, how are graded and ungraded formative assessments different from one another?
I’ll need to qualify my answers by distinguishing between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ and in terms of the meanings of the key terms.
In theory, I would define ‘formative’ assessment as “useful feedback with an opportunity to use that feedback” to perform optimally on later summative assessments. A simple example: a pre-season of 4 games in soccer (as well as ongoing “scrimmages”) in which the games don’t ‘count’ is formative assessment to get teams ready for the games that do count in the regular season. So, your comment about “use the information to evaluate teaching” introduces a slightly different purpose for me. Formative assessments provide feedback – for students first, then teachers; that’s their purpose.
A 2nd simple example, more complicated: Suppose as an English teacher I do a pre-test writing on day 1 of my course, the same test is given twice during the year, and a post-test is given on the last day of the course – and it is the SAME prompt each time (say, a writing prompt on the course Essential Question “How well do we know ourselves?”). I will most likely NOT grade the pre-test, but I might grade it while not ‘counting’ the grade, i.e. tell students where they stand (e.g. what teachers do when they use a practice AP test or use the state rubric). But I also might grade and thus ‘count’ the ‘formative’ writing prompts DURING the year as well as the post-test at year’s end IF I felt that students should be ‘ready’ to be tested on their understanding and writing ability thus far.
Another not so simple example: I give you feedback on your college essay before you submit the final ‘real’ essay to your college. I might “grade” your college essay draft with a B- as well as giving you feedback and advice on how to improve it for the final “summative” version you hand in to the colleges of your choice since we have been working on essays all year. And I might even put that B- in my gradebook as one grade of many for you in English 12 this year. (But, then, I might also raise your grade once I see the ‘final’ version you sent to the colleges and count only the final’ grade on that personal essay in my gradebook.
In short, no matter the pure definition, I don’t think it is accurate to say that formative assessments can’t ever be graded. What matters – what makes a formative assessment formative – is whether I have a chance to get and use feedback in a later version of the ‘same’ performance. It’s only formative if it is ongoing; it’s only summative if it is the final chance, the ‘summing up’ of student performance.
What’s really more irksome for me in these kinds of matters is when people utterly abuse the idea of formative by describing any non-end-of-course assessment as formative. It is completely bogus to declare that ‘homework’ and quizzes are ‘formative’ simply because they are different from quizzes and because they occur throughout the year. If the specific demand only occurs once and you can’t use the feedback from them to do better next time, i.e. if the homework and journals are unique one-time events, then that individual homework assignment is summative. Just because it is not at the end of the year or semester doesn’t make it formative. It’s only formative if it recurs as a task in which I can learn from feedback to improve at the ‘same’ task.
Now, a critic may say – c’mon, Grant: they learn from doing homework how to do homework – so it’s formative and not 1-shot. And we grade it because we want them to be accountable for homework. Fair enough, I suppose (if that is really true). Calling homework assignments formative seems like a stretch to me. The content is unique and we grade the content not just the doing of it in most cases. If the grade is just for turning it in then I might acquiesce. On the other hand, calling a journal ‘formative’ and grading it for development over time seems reasonable.
However, we can say for sure that any truly one-shot assessment – homework, journal, quiz, paper – is summative, no matter when it occurs.
Call me a cynic, but my hunch here is that the makers of this rule are doing it unthinkingly in terms of the pure ideas. They seem to be just throwing trendy language around (at least from what you sent me; that’s all I can refer to). It sounds like they care less about the true meaning of ‘formative’ assessment than they care about making sure that kids do their work and are held accountable for it. FINE! But don’t call homework and journals ‘formative’ then.
Suppose I am wrong; suppose that the point of the plan is to make sure kids do their work AND to provide more truly formative assessment opportunities for kids, AND to expand the different types of assessments to give kids more options for showing what they know and can do. Fine! But then the policy would probably be different than the one proposed, I think.
A policy sensitive to these issues and designed to give kids more opportunities to get good feedback and use it would make that more clear in the policy statement. It would make clear when you should and when you should not include a grade in a kid’s average, what kinds of ‘fair chances’ to learn they need, and that journals and homework are only ‘formative’ if kids can improve at those tasks over time and have the later grades count more than the earlier grades (or some other reasonable rule).
What is really wanted here is a full discussion of the assumption that lurks below consciousness: the longstanding thoughtlessness of averaging grades to compute interim and final grades. This is just a dumb habit that penalizes growth and over-rewards wild swings of performance – though steady growth is what we presumably value in learners. Another day I’ll tackle that beast!
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19 Responses
Thanks so much for clarifying the homework issue. Very interesting blog post.
Mike
My school wants everything graded therefore a child can take homework home, have a parent help them with it, get a perfect score, fail miserably on the end of the unit test and still pass the course. Seems ridiculous to me. In order to get around it, I only assign 5% of the grade as HW. Therefore, my “assessments” in class really tell the story. I can’t wait until we go to standards based report cards and I can get rid of the whole letter grade thing which really tells the student and parents nothing. And I agree with you on the whole averaging thing. One poor score or one really great score can skew the whole thing. What does that tell a student or parent?
Check out my most recent blog entry which offers part 1 of a set of policy ideas for how to handle problems like this
Great ideas on your most recent entry. I absolutely love reading your blog and often forward your writing on to my principal. It might not change things right away, but at least it keeps them thinking. Thanks for everything you do for education.
I have been chairing a grading committee in my district for over a year now with the intention to reform our grading practices from traditional to standards-based. Our literature review has encouraged us to grade, record and report all aspects of student learning: process, product, and progress; however, each of these components need to be graded, recorded, and reported separately from one another, as opposed to being averaged into one grade. Furthermore, process, products, and progress grades representing students’ mastery of specific learning standards should be recorded and reported separately.
As I read more and more about the difference between formative vs. summative assessments, and examples of each, I find the the argument to be a semantic one. Although, there is clear distinction between the application of formative and summative assessments, the feedback students receive from both types of assessments is summative in nature. Feedback, whether you are providing students with descriptive narratives or a numerical score, represents students’ learning achievement at a particular place in time, which makes it all recordable and reportable. Now, if the feedback or grades are used to inform instructional interventions, then the summative grades are being used formatively. Formative assessment grades should be recorded and reported to improve communication among teachers, students, and parents. Teachers will also have much more data to reflect on when designing instructional activities and specific learning interventions.
Overall, I have found the distinction of assessments as being formative or summative to be confusing among all educational stakeholders, and misleading when discussing students’ performance feedback. I think a better description would be “practice” or “process” assessments and grades, and “product” assessments and grades.
A note about progress grades, only because I mentioned it at the beginning of my rant, would consist of feedback describing the growth between unit pre- and post-assessments. Whether that feedback is better reported qualitatively or quantitatively, I cannot say, for our committee is still reviewing the literature on that one.
Paul: I am confused. All assessments may be graded but that doesn’t mean there is no distinction between formative and summative. A grade is not feedback; feedback is information I can use about what did and didn’t work.
The issue is clear to me, and not just semantic: if you get multiple attempts at a summative task then the initial trials are formative, whether or not they are graded. If you get one shot at the task, it is summative and not formative. Why does the language matter? Because students need feedback and opportunities to use it on recurring tasks, processes and ideas. (None of these 3 can be mastered and tested in one go by almost all learners.) So, unless we deliberately design ‘formative’ assessments, all assessments typically end up as one-shot attempts that highlight content only – neither fair nor a good way to develop mastery.
And why grade everything? Does the coach give grades after every drill and scrimmage? Does the conductor grade the orchestra in rehearsal? ‘Data’ does not equal grades and scores if those grades and scores hide the feedback rather than reveal it. Grades are NOT feedback, strictly speaking; they are value judgments and hence useless as descriptive feedback.
Another very interesting blog entry. A question coming up at my school is whether a transfer task IS the summative assessment in a unit or if they are two separate things. Could you give your thoughts on this?
Good question. I think the problem stems from thinking that “transfer” equals assessment. It doesn’t. I might ask students to transfer their learning as part of learning and not assess it formally at all. This happens in every soccer or jazz band practice: we learn some things, then try using them in context as part of learning. Or, in math, I might give you a novel problem as part of instruction; in reading I give you anew text to see what you do with it. In other words, I want you to practice confronting such a task which we would then discuss after the attempt. Only in the very loosest sense is that ‘formative’. (If we call such an activity ‘formative’ then almost everything I ask kids to do is formative in the sense that I and they get some feedback as part of doing it.)
On the other hand, I would certainly want to know if students can transfer their learning as part of any summative assessment. Otherwise, the summative is just testing for recall. That’s why the harder standardized test questions try to give kids a novel-looking math problem or a novel text or writing prompt to respond to. (People seem confused on this point: all the hard test questions are NOT low-level; they involve meaning-making and transfer to some extent.)
Our school district is in the process of going to a competency based grading system. One controversial change made this year is that homework cannot be graded. A teacher must provide feedback, but all graded assessments, both formative and summative, must be started and completed in the classroom. As an English teacher, I am in shock right now. According to our Curriculum Coordinating Council, we cannot allow our students to write a paper outside of class if we want to use it as an assessment. What are your thoughts on this? When I asked the council about writing longer research papers and the improbable task of writing the entire paper in class, I was told that the Common Core says nothing about paper length, and a shorter research paper could be assigned and completed during classtime. We operate on a traditional eight period day with 45 minute class periods. In the past our English department had assigned a five to ten page research paper in both tenth and twelfth grades. We want our students to be prepared for college and challenged to write longer, more in depth papers. What are your thoughts on this? All my research on compentency based graded says homework belongs in a traditional grading system, but I found nothing on whether or not assessments can be completed outside of the classroom.
I think the policy you describe is nuts. College-ready means you must be able to write at home papers of 6 pages or more on a weekly basis. My son’s 2 former room-mates at Ursinus dropped out over their inability to write and manage time. I taught in two prep schools and the average take-home writing assignment was weekly of approximately 4-6 pages in my class, and that is standard for any prep school English teacher.
I am very concerned about the bastardization of so-called ‘competency-based’ and ‘mastery-based- learning. Indeed I have an article coming out on that subject in Ed Leadership in the December issue (devoted to learning for Mastery). Look for it.
Formative assessments entail a lot of work on the part of the teacher. He or she has to evaluate the assessments – quickly – and then possibly (probably) make an adjustment in teaching. You can’t just grade a quiz and go on to the next unit if half the class if the quiz shows half the class has not mastered the material.
Hi Grant… a question this raises for me. If we do not grade many or most formative assessments, and use them more as true opportunities for practice/feedback… what are your thoughts about students getting overly anxious about summative assessments? If a student is very good about meeting deadlines for homework, and works hard to always do their best on formative work, and simply struggles with concepts on tests, and another student is disorganized and flippant about homework, but does well on summative tests… there are two different skills at work. And both have value in the world. Do you give some sort of credit simply for “doing” the homework to hold students accountable and reward timeliness and effort, or do you prefer to just see how well a student does on the summative assessment?
In my science class, one of the big skills I focus on is how to design a controlled experiment, collect data, analyze it, and write a formal lab report. Those lab reports, in a sense, are both formative (lots of practice with basic skills of data organization, writing a procedure, etc), but also summative in a way, as they have to write a discussion that explains the science principles at work. Overall, these reports have a stronger impact on my students’ grade than tests that focus on conceptual content.
I think this illustrates why a single letter grade is poor feedback. You want each student to get the feedback they have earned, so making it clear that process, deadlines, results all matter is the wisest approach. Try to avoid turning it into a single grade until the last possible moment is the most helpful approach for kids.
Thanks for the feedback. I found my way here because our school is using the UbD approach to look at our PreK-12 curriculum, and its a pretty new initiative… still learning about the framework. I appreciate that you keep an active blog and respond to questions!
Happy to help!
Thinking back to my own grade school days (a long time ago), we only had summative assessment. Today, I can see assessment solutions coming from many directions, including technology.
I’ve read this post and comments a few times, grateful for the thoughtfulness of the participants. To follow from my initial reflection in the above comment: what kinds of technology do you use for formative and summative assessments (if any)? Do you see this as enabling the mentoring activities of teachers by freeing up precious educator time? What pitfalls or issues are there in your school’s implementation of technology-based formative and summative assessments? Most importantly, do you think students benefit from the application of technology to assessments? Perhaps these questions are better left for another blog post, but I’ll at least put them on the table here.
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