Formative and summative assessments – what’s the difference?

The language of summative and formative assessment is used to distinguish between assessment used for different purposes. In a nutshell, formative assessment helps guide further learning; summative assessment evaluates learning at the end of a period of study, often by comparing it against a standard or benchmark.

Diagnostic assessment: This provides teachers with the data needed to diagnose individual learning needs and plan how to help learners make further progress. Diagnostic assessment is mainly for teachers rather than learners. If a learner does not know enough about a topic, then they do not need feedback, they need more teaching.

Motivational assessment: This provides learners (or their parents/carers) with information about what the learner has done well and what they can do to improve future learning. For motivational assessment to be effective, it must tell the learner something that is within their power to act on. Telling a child to ‘include more detail,’ when they don’t have the knowledge to do so, is demotivating and counter-productive. Only where the gap between actual and desired performance is small enough for the learner to address it with no more than a small nudge, can feedback be motivating. On the other hand, feedback about effort, attendance, behaviour or homework provides information that can motivate learners to make different choices.¹

Self-assessment: Learner agency, resilience and independence can be built by teaching metacognitive self-assessment strategies. Teaching learners about the power of retrieval practice, and how they can use this to enhance their learning, is a very powerful strategy and should form a central plank of each learner’s self-assessment repertoire. Learners should also be taught strategies for checking their own work – for example monitoring writing for transcription errors, reading written work aloud to check for sense and clarity, or using inverse operations in maths to check for answers.
 

Informative assessment: This enables schools to report information about performance relative to other learners, to parents/carers.

Evaluative assessment: This enables schools to set targets and evaluate their performance. Evaluative assessment can also feed into system-wide data allowing MATs, local authorities and the DfE to monitor and evaluate the performance of the schools’ system at an individual school and whole-system level.

Of all of these different types of assessment, I believe diagnostic assessment is the most important as it enables teachers to respond to the learning needs of children. However whatever type of assessment you chose, you need to ensure you are assessing both short- and long-term understanding, for example:

• In the moment, as teachers teach, in order to flex their teaching on the spot to clarify and address misconceptions
• After lessons, through looking at learners’ work, in order to plan subsequent lessons to meet learner needs
• At the end of units of work, in order to evaluate how successful teaching of a particular topic has been and what might need to be improved the next time this unit is taught
• In the longer term, in order to check what learners have retained over time and provide opportunities for revisiting and consolidating learning that has been forgotten.

In a nutshell, assessment, whether formative or summative, holds the potential to provide invaluable insights into individuals and groups of children, but just make sure this is not done in isolation.
 

_{¹ Some children may face additional barriers that make it much more challenging to make improvements in one or more of these areas. Young children are not responsible for their attendance, for example. Some children with SEMH need more than information to help them improve their behaviour.}