In the context of student learning, assessment can be regarded as the collection of information that will be used to guide a course of action or to evaluate a learner’s ability. A number of descriptors can be associated with the term assessment, but the three most common are diagnostic, formative, and summative.
It’s not a matter of how the information is collected that distinguishes an assessment as diagnostic, formative, or summative; rather, it’s in the way that the information is used.
Let’s examine each of these in more detail.
The late educational psychologist David Ausubel once stated “the most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.” Diagnostic assessments are attempts to ascertain what the learner already knows. These types of assessments are usually, but not always, conducted prior to instruction. It is a way for teachers to identify individual student strengths and weaknesses. They also allow the teacher to set up remediation activities for those students who need it and, if necessary, to re-structure the curriculum to accommodate the needs of the class.
A key attribute – one that essentially distinguishes formative from summative assessments is that information gleaned from a formative assessment will be used (by either the learner or by the teacher) to shape subsequent learning of the students who participated in the formative assessment.
In his book Educative Assessment, Grant Wiggins (1998) describes four essential pieces of information that must be conveyed to students in order to maximize the impact of the formative assessment: 1.) students need a demystification of the standards against which they will be evaluated, 2.) they must be provided with multiple opportunities accompanied with immediate feedback to learn to master complex tasks, 3.) they need frequent reports of progress so that they can ascertain the extent to which their current status deviates from their desired status, and 4.) they need to know how they are doing as they do it.
The fact that it is mentioned twice in the above paragraph should convey to you the critical importance of feedback in formative assessment. Simply put, feedback is supplying information about how a person did based on what they attempted. It works to confirm or refute the learner’s set of actions. With respect to the learner, feedback can take manifest itself in any or all of the following three forms, with each successive form being more complex and useful than the previous: correct vs. incorrect, presentation of a correct solution path, comparison between the learner’s solution path and a correct solution path.
Correct vs. Incorrect – either you got the correct answer or you didn’t. This doesn’t seem like a lot and compared to the other two, it’s not, but this level of feedback does provide useful information to both the learner and teacher/parent. If you solved the problem correctly, you should be confident that the solution path is correct. If the problem was solved incorrectly, the learner must be doing something wrong. Unfortunately, this level of feedback does not say anything about what that something could be.
Correct solution path – if you are trying to solve a math problem and you get the problem wrong, you would probably want to know the correct way to solve the problem. You could either try to solve the problem again, especially if you recognize the mistake you made in your earlier attempt or you could be provided with the correct solution path. In either case, you are being provided with beneficial information with respect to your ability to solve the problem.
Compare solution paths – a more powerful form of feedback is when you are able to compare your unsuccessful solution path with a correct solution. Not only do you gain the benefits knowing if your answer is correct or not and being given the opportunity to see a correct solution path to the problem, but at this level of complexity, you can compare the steps you made to solve the problem with the steps in the correct solution path.
Comparing solution paths allows the learner and/or teacher to understand exactly what went wrong while the learner was solving the problem: was it a typographical error, a computational mistake, or does the learner simply not yet understand the concepts well enough to perform well on that specific type of problem. Each situation requires a different type of intervention to help the learner becomes more successful.
When a judgement or decision needs to be made regarding student performance, then a summative assessment is in order. Summative assessments represent an endpoint that provides information about overall student development, skill acquisition, or achievement level. Teachers can use the information garnered from a summative assessment to evaluate instructional effectiveness and to make changes to the instructional practice, but this would not be regarded as a formative assessment, because the information is being used to make changes that will impact a different set of students than the ones who participated in the assessment. The students who were assessed will not benefit from any changes that the teacher makes at the end of the year, because by the time the teacher implements the changes, she will have a new set of students.
Summative assessments are often associated with high-stakes standardized tests that are administered near the end of the year, but they do not have to be. As it’s been mentioned earlier, it’s not the format that determines the type of assessment; it is how the collected assessment information is used that ultimately determines it’s diagnostic, formative, or summative. For summative evaluations, the collected information needs to be collected at such a time and in such a way that the teacher can make a value judgement with respect to a specific dimension of student learning.
MathAscend is a free web-based educational resource capable of collecting the necessary information used for all three assessments. A teacher using mathAscend on the very first day of class could perform a diagnostic assessment by having her students engage in problem-solving on a particular set of topics. These topics could be material covered previously and will serve as needed “stepping stones” to help her students learn the new topics associated with the course. It benefits both the teacher and the students if the teacher knows going into the semester which students have a firm grasp of essential prerequisite material and which students are in need of remediation.
Every problem-solving module and quiz within mathAscend provides the opportunity for students to show their work directly in the website. The students’ solution pathways are stored within the system’s database for easy retrieval. Also, every problem within mathAscend has its own solution path that can be viewed by the students. So, if a student solves a problem incorrectly he can view his solution path and compare it to the correct solution path provided by mathAscend. Teachers can also take advantage of seeing the student’s incorrect solution path and comparing it directly to the correct solution path. This side-by-side comparison is a great way of identifying student misconceptions.
Summative assessment of student performance is also capable in mathAscend. The quiz feature presents students with a set of 10 problems that must be solved within 30 minutes. Students do not know if a problem has been solved correctly until either all 10 problems have been solved or the 30 minute time limit elapses. Once the quiz is over, the student’s score is made available to both the student and the teacher, along with any work the student showed for each problem. Because student scores are recorded as the number correct out of 10, they are easily converted into percentages for quick evaluation of student performance.
Assessing student learning is about getting students and teachers the information they need to improve student learning. Typically, these take the form of diagnostic, formative, or summative assessments. The important thing to remember is that it is not how the information is collected that makes the assessment diagnostic, formative, or summative; rather, it is how the information is used that defines each assessment strategy: identifying strengths or topics for remediation (diagnostic), providing feedback (formative), or evaluating performance (summative).
Daniel Domin has a PhD. in Curriculum and Instruction from Purdue University and has over 15 years experience with assessing student learning and conducting student problem-solving research. He serves as the Executive Director of AppleSTEM.