Successful Examples of Summative Assessment Designs

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is the only assessment program that captures a nationally representative sample of students in order to evaluate state, regional, and national educational performance.

The Developmental Assessment Program of Australia (Masters & Forster, 1996) is designed to measure growth in competence on particular tasks by employing progress maps. Progress maps provide a description of skills, understandings, and knowledge in the sequence in which students typically learn and develop (NRC, 2001). The progress maps are also used to theoretically align both large-scale and classroom assessments so that they support one another.

The College Board® AP® Studio Art program is a curriculum-embedded design that requires students to compile a portfolio of work that may have been produced during or prior to the academic year for individual students’ summative evaluations.

Facets DIAGNOSER may also be used as a curriculum- embedded assessment by student evaluations based on the most advanced module of student completion.

Formative and summative assessments are not independent of each other and, in fact, have a dynamic relationship. The dynamism lies in the feedback processes that each provide for teacher and student. In other words, formative assessments should be designed to optimize student performance on summative assessments and provide summative information for teacher and student. Summative assessments should be designed to provide general feedback to teachers of students’ learning and development in a given area for instruction. In fact, independent of design, the distinction between formative and summative assessments is in the use of the produced information, whether for instructional feedback or decision making.

State Testing – Readers Respond

NY Times Schoolbook blog asked: “How are your children holding up during standardized testing?” The week of testing has ended, and here are the responses.