definition of summative assessment in education

Summative Assessment: Understanding its Definition, Purpose, and Importance in Education

Learn about Summative Assessment in this educational glossary entry.

Summative assessment is a method used in education to evaluate students' learning at the end of an instructional unit or period. It is a formal assessment that typically occurs after a period of learning, such as the completion of a project, a unit of study, or a course. Unlike formative assessment, which aims to provide ongoing feedback to improve learning during the instructional process, summative assessment focuses on measuring the overall learning outcomes and achievement of students.

Summative assessments come in various forms, including standardized tests, final exams, projects, essays, and presentations. These assessments are designed to measure the extent to which students have mastered the learning objectives and standards set by the curriculum. The results of summative assessments are often used to assign grades or scores to students, which are then used to evaluate their academic performance and progress.

Purpose of Summative Assessment

The primary purpose of summative assessment is to evaluate students' understanding of the material covered in a specific period of instruction. By assessing students at the end of a unit or course, educators can determine the extent to which students have achieved the learning objectives and standards set by the curriculum. Summative assessments provide a comprehensive view of students' overall performance and help educators make informed decisions about students' progress and academic success.

Summative assessment also serves as a tool for accountability in education. By measuring students' learning outcomes against established standards, summative assessments help educational institutions, policymakers, and other stakeholders assess the effectiveness of instructional programs and curriculum. These assessments provide valuable data that can be used to identify areas of improvement, make informed decisions about resource allocation, and ensure that students are meeting academic expectations.

Types of Summative Assessment

There are several types of summative assessments commonly used in education, each serving a specific purpose and providing valuable insights into students' learning. Some of the most common types of summative assessment include:

• Standardized Tests: These tests are administered to all students in a standardized format and measure students' knowledge and skills against a set of predetermined criteria. Standardized tests are often used to assess students' proficiency in core subjects such as math, reading, and science.
• Final Exams: Final exams are comprehensive assessments administered at the end of a course or semester to evaluate students' understanding of the material covered throughout the term. These exams typically cover a wide range of topics and require students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills.
• Projects: Project-based assessments require students to apply their knowledge and skills to complete a hands-on project or task. These assessments allow students to demonstrate their creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities in a real-world context.
• Essays: Essay assessments require students to write a structured response to a prompt or question, demonstrating their ability to organize and communicate their ideas effectively. Essays are often used to assess students' writing skills, critical thinking, and analytical abilities.
• Presentations: Presentation assessments require students to deliver a speech or presentation on a specific topic, demonstrating their ability to communicate information clearly and persuasively. Presentations assess students' public speaking skills, research abilities, and presentation techniques.

Importance of Summative Assessment

Summative assessment plays a crucial role in the education system for several reasons:

• Evaluation of Learning: Summative assessments provide educators with a comprehensive view of students' learning outcomes and achievements. By evaluating students' performance at the end of an instructional period, educators can assess the effectiveness of their teaching methods and the extent to which students have mastered the learning objectives.
• Feedback for Improvement: While the primary purpose of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning, the results of these assessments can also provide valuable feedback for improvement. By analyzing students' performance on summative assessments, educators can identify areas of strength and weakness in the curriculum and make necessary adjustments to improve student learning outcomes.
• Accountability and Transparency: Summative assessments help ensure accountability and transparency in education by measuring students' learning outcomes against established standards. These assessments provide objective data that can be used to assess the effectiveness of educational programs, evaluate student performance, and make data-driven decisions to improve educational quality.
• Grading and Reporting: Summative assessments are often used to assign grades or scores to students, which are then used to evaluate their academic performance and progress. These grades provide valuable information to students, parents, and educators about students' achievements, strengths, and areas for improvement.
• Evidence of Learning: Summative assessments serve as evidence of students' learning and achievements, demonstrating the knowledge and skills they have acquired throughout the instructional period. These assessments provide a tangible record of students' progress and can be used to showcase their academic accomplishments to others.

In conclusion, summative assessment is a valuable tool in education that helps evaluate students' learning outcomes, measure their achievements, and ensure accountability in the education system. By providing a comprehensive view of students' performance at the end of an instructional period, summative assessments play a crucial role in assessing student progress, informing instructional decisions, and improving educational quality.

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Teaching excellence & educational innovation, what is the difference between formative and summative assessment, formative assessment.

The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments:

• help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work
• help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately

Formative assessments are generally low stakes , which means that they have low or no point value. Examples of formative assessments include asking students to:

• draw a concept map in class to represent their understanding of a topic
• submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a lecture
• turn in a research proposal for early feedback

Summative assessment

The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.

Summative assessments are often high stakes , which means that they have a high point value. Examples of summative assessments include:

• a midterm exam
• a final project
• a senior recital

Information from summative assessments can be used formatively when students or faculty use it to guide their efforts and activities in subsequent courses.

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What Is Summative Assessment: A Practical Guide For Teachers On When And How To Use It

Zoe Benjamin

Are you looking to design a summative assessment that accurately measures your students’ learning progress? It may seem like creating a test is a straightforward task – just jot down some questions and select the answers. But if you aspire to create assessments that genuinely reflect your learners’ abilities and enhance their academic achievements, you need to adopt a considered approach embedding summative assessments into your teaching plans from the start 

In this article, we’ll delve into the benefits and limitations of summative assessments on student achievement and provide recommendations for teachers to improve the effectiveness of this form of assessment for their learners.

What is summative assessment?

Summative assessment is an evaluation of students’ current understanding and achievement. It allows teachers to track learners’ progress over a period of time. It is done at the end of teaching unit or several teaching units and can be benchmarked or standardised against other students’ work.

The findings of these assessments can be used to make informed decisions about how to support each individual pupil in succeeding and determine whether they have achieved the required learning objectives or content domains. 

The Ultimate Guide to Maths Assessments

This guide offers a breakdown of primary and secondary math assessments, with proven strategies and free resources to use in the classroom.

Examples of summative assessment

Summative assessments can take many forms, including in class tests, exams, projects, or essays, and are often scored to provide a quantifiable measure of students’ performance.

It’s worth saying that in fact there’s nothing intrinsic to an assessment activity that makes it either summative or formative – it’s what you do with the information that you gain from the assessment that determines this.

That said, there are some assessement types that are more commonly used summatively. These include:

• Benchmark tests given at the start of the year or a unit of work with the intention of comparing the results with future assessment data.
• Online assessments designed to measure transferable skills and academic aptitude to make predictions and targets for future attainment.
• Portfolios of work , for subjects such as Art or Photography.
• A final project following a period of group work.
• Midterm exams or classroom assessments at the end of a unit of study.
• Performance assessments that showcase students’ development of new skills.
• Key stage assessments that form part of a national curriculum.
• Standardised tests that are sat by students of the same age throughout a country, such as GCSEs and SATs

Formative vs summative assessments

The difference between formative and summative assessment is their purpose, design, frequency, and outcomes. While summative assessment is an assessment of learning, formative assessment is an assessment for learning .

Read more: Formative assessment examples

Formative and summative assessments are the two types of assessment that are most prevalent in education literature. The table below shows their main characteristics:

Benefits of summative assessment practices 

The benefits of incorporating summative assessment into teaching methods may not be as apparent as those of formative assessment, as they are often less immediate and direct than the advantages gained from ongoing assessment strategies that promote learning.

But summative assessments bring many benefits that enhance teaching and learning.

Tracking student progress

Summative assessments offer assessment data that is typically used to track student progress over time. This data indicates whether students are making the expected level of progress based on their age and abilities.

Accountability

The results of summative assessments provide an objective measure of accountability for teachers and students. 

Teachers can use students’ end-of-year or external assessment results in their appraisal meetings to evaluate their teaching approaches. Additionally, students can be held accountable if their results indicate a decrease in effort or underperformance in one or more subjects.

Motivating students 

Summative assessments provide high-stakes conditions for students to showcase their capabilities to themselves and others. These assessments motivate students to prepare and revise more thoroughly than they might for other types of evaluations. 

However, lower ability students and those with exam anxiety may be less motivated by summative assessments, which can lead to a decrease in their effort and motivation as the assessment date approaches.

Preparation for external exams

GCSEs and A-Levels are external exams that act as summative assessments at the end of a course. High stakes classroom assessments, such as midterm exams, offer valuable exam practice for time management, meeting assessment objectives, and managing exam anxiety. 

Summative assessments will require students retrieving information from their long term memory which can help to further embed it and support improved performance during external exams.

Standardisation 

Summative assessments can provide schools and education systems with objective data to create standardised scores for each learner. This enables individuals and small cohorts to be compared to other students and larger cohorts. 

Standardisation is often used to determine the grade boundaries in external exams.

How can summative assessment impact student achievement?

The manner in which summative assessment is carried out can have a considerable impact on the academic progress of students.

Summative assessment helps:

• track student progress and identify underachievement, allowing for interventions to be put in place.
• reveal issues with exam technique.
• hold students and teachers accountable and increase motivation to improve learning outcomes.
• prepare students for external exams, improving long-term memory retrieval and adjusting revision and exam strategies accordingly.

Read more: Adaptive teaching

In all cases above, increased achievement is defined as achieving a higher result in a future summative assessment. 

This may not be a reliable or valid measure of achievement, but until education institutions move away from standardised testing and entry requirements that depend on the results of summative assessments, it is an important measure to consider.

Limitations of summative assessment

Summative assessments are widely used in education to measure student achievement, but they also have limitations every teacher should be aware of:

Provides a limited snapshot of student achievement

Summative assessment is limited in that it provides a snapshot of student achievement at one point in time and uses a limited range of assessment strategies.

The validity and appropriateness of summative assessments, particularly external exams, has been scrutinised in the UK after ‘teacher assessed grades’ were used to replace external exams during periods of lockdown.

Closed-book exams may not accurately reflect students’ ability or potential

There is uncertainty about whether closed-book exams that are taken at the end of GCSE and A-Level courses provide an accurate reflection of students’ ability or academic potential.

Students can be coached to perform well on summative assessments, which takes time away from deepening students’ understanding or studying a broader curriculum.

Critics of summative assessment argue that ‘open-book’ assessments would be more appropriate so that students can be tested on their ability to apply and fact-check the material they have access to.

Comparing students based on summative grades might be unfair

Using summative grades to compare students to each other or to gain entry into a school, college, or university, seems unfair when final grades are so dependent on factors outside of students’ control.

Summative assessments can emphasise memorization

Summative assessments often require students to memorise material, which is becoming an increasingly redundant skill given how readily information is available online.

Time spent memorising material ahead of a summative assessment could be better spent deepening students’ understanding or improving their ability to critically interact with new material.

Summative assessment tips for teachers

As a teacher, designing and administering effective summative assessments can be challenging. Here are some tips to help you create successful summative assessments for your students.

1. Design a summative assessment based on its purpose

The content of a summative assessment needs to be carefully selected – and this content may vary depending on the intended use of the assessment data.

Let’s consider short formal tests administered at the end of a unit of work or half-term which is based only on the work completed during that time period. Benefits of tests like these include:

• Increased motivation for students to revise and consolidate learned content
• An increase in student achievement due to the testing effect
• Helps to identify students who may benefit from intervention (note that summative test results should not be the only method for identifying these students, as discussed above)
• Provision of feedback on the effectiveness of curriculum design and implementation (the extent to which learning intentions match with learning accomplished)

However, while this type of short formal test has lots of benefits, it is not as useful for providing a longer-term picture of student progress and to measure attainment of more generalised learning goals.

For example, it is unlikely to be appropriate to convert the data collected from an isolated end of unit assessment to a GCSE grade to report to parents as part of a school’s wider monitoring processes. This is because it’s highly likely that different content domains are assessed with each separate unit test, and fluctuations in results may reflect the comparative difficulty of the material covered rather than any meaningful change in a student’s progress.

2. Offer clear instructions throughout the assessment

Ensure the instructions throughout the assessment clearly convey what is required from the student (e.g. show each step of your calculation).

Create a mark scheme or rubric before the assessment is set so that you are clear about what is required from each question and check that the exam instructions accurately explain this to the students. 

3. Ensure consistency in summative assessments from year to year

On the one hand it’s a good idea to use the same summative assessments each year so that each cohort of students can be compared to cohorts from previous years.

This allows departments to evaluate their own performance and to make adjustments if a cohort’s performance differs significantly from previous years. By including a mixture of recent and past topics on each summative assessment you will utilise the benefits of retrieval practice and spacing.

On the other hand, regular reviews of how you are assessing content throughout the year will help to make sure you meet the needs of each particular cohort of students.

Read more: Retrieval practice activities

4. Prepare students in advance

Prepare students for summative assessments and reduce exam anxiety by giving them Year 6 SATs practice papers or practice GCSE maths papers that match the summative assessment in terms of style and content. 

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Summative assessment is designed to produce a measure of achievement. It is important because it helps teachers to track their students’ progress and gives students an opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge to external organisations such as employers or universities.

An assessment that has a clear purpose and allows comparisons to be made with the results or past or future assessments.

External exams like Year 6 SATs, GCSEs or A-Levels End of year or end of topic exams Benchmark or aptitude tests that measure transferable skills and academic potential

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Summative Assessment and Feedback

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Summative assessments are given to students at the end of a course and should measure the skills and knowledge a student has gained over the entire instructional period. Summative feedback is aimed at helping students understand how well they have done in meeting the overall learning goals of the course.

Effective summative assessments

Effective summative assessments provide students a structured way to demonstrate that they have met a range of key learning objectives and to receive useful feedback on their overall learning. They should align with the course learning goals and build upon prior formative assessments. These assessments will address how well the student is able to synthesize and connect the elements of learning from the entirety of the course into a holistic understanding and provide an opportunity to provide rich summative feedback.

The value of summative feedback

Summative feedback is essential for students to understand how far they have come in meeting the learning goals of the course, what they need further work on, and what they should study next. This can affect later choices that students make, particularly in contemplating and pursuing their major fields of study. Summative feedback can also influence how students regard themselves and their academic disciplines after graduation.

Use rubrics to provide consistency and transparency

A rubric is a grading guide for evaluating how well students have met a learning outcome. A rubric consists of performance criteria, a rating scale, and indicators for the different rating levels. They are typically in a chart or table format. 

Instructors often use rubrics for both formative and summative feedback to ensure consistency of assessment across different students. Rubrics also can make grading faster and help to create consistency between multiple graders and across assignments.

Students might be given access to the rubric before working on an assignment. No criteria or metric within a summative assessment should come as a surprise to the students. Transparency with students on exactly what is being assessed can help them more effectively demonstrate how much they have learned.  

Types of  summative assessments

Different summative assessments are better suited to measuring different kinds of learning. 

Examinations

Examinations are useful for evaluating student learning in terms of remembering information, and understanding and applying concepts and ideas. However, exams may be less suited to evaluating how well students are able to analyze, evaluate, or create things related to what they've learned.

Presentation

A presentation tasks the student with teaching others what they have learned typically by speaking, presenting visual materials, and interacting with their audience. This can be useful for assessing a student's ability to critically analyze and evaluate a topic or content.

With projects, students will create something, such as a plan, document, artifact, or object, usually over a sustained period of time, that demonstrates skills or understanding of the topic of learning. They are useful for evaluating learning objectives that require high levels of critical thinking, creativity, and coordination. Projects are good opportunities to provide summative feedback because they often build on prior formative assessments and feedback. 

With a portfolio, students create and curate a collection of documents, objects, and artifacts that collectively demonstrate their learning over a wide range of learning goals. Portfolios usually include the student's reflections and metacognitive analysis of their own learning. Portfolios are typically completed over a sustained period of time and are usually done by individual students as opposed to groups. 

Portfolios are particularly useful for evaluating how students' learning, attitudes, beliefs, and creativity grow over the span of the course. The reflective component of portfolios can be a rich form of self-feedback for students. Generally, portfolios tend to be more holistic and are often now done using ePortfolios .