Assessment as Learning

Assessment of learning in higher education is an essential part of university teachers’ work. The aim of this study is to explore the emotions that academics experience in formative and summative assessment. The aim is also to examine whether academics’ emotions in assessment vary according to their disciplinary background. The data consisted of responses of 118 academics from a large multidisciplinary university who responded to a survey about assessment and emotions. Comparisons of emotions experienced in different assessment methods and purposes, and comparisons between academics from different disciplinary backgrounds were made by calculating medians and their 95% confidence intervals. The most intensive emotions evoked by both formative and summative assessment were contentment and joy, while the least intensive emotions were anxiety, shame and boredom. Hope was more experienced in formative than in summative assessment and despair was rare in the summative assessment. Academics from humanities and social sciences reported experiencing more compassion, despair and boredom during formative assessment and more anxiety, compassion and irritation during summative assessment than academics from natural and life sciences. The results of the study have theoretical and practical implications for researchers and educators in educational development programmes for academic staff.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of formative and summative language assessment of young language learners, including the steps involved in developing a di- agnostic test of English for primary school children. The importance of determining the level of English competence in young learners is emphasized, and various assessment and teaching are explored. The article covers both formative assessment, which allows for ongoing feedback and progress monitoring, as well as summative assessment. The four essential language skills - listening, speaking, reading, and writing - are examined in detail, and strategies for assessing each skill are discussed. The article also empha- sizes the need to use assessment results for diagnostic purposes to improve teaching and learning outcomes. This article is intended for language educators and policymakers seeking to improve language instruction and evaluation in primary education settings.

The quotation in the title highlights the experience of many students of summative assessment as the dominant mode of assessment in most South African schools. As a result, students enter university ignorant of good formative feedback and they are therefore often unable to recognise its value and may even be traumatised by the presence of so much ink on the page. This situation indicates a need for explicit focus on formative assessment and its usefulness for EAL university students in South Africa. This article is based on focus group interviews, which formed part of an ongoing critical action research project exploring formative assessment in an academic writing course for disadvantaged access students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In previous stages of this research, Wilhelm Meyer and Penny Niven have explored their identity as writing teachers giving feedback on student essays and attempted to implement the principles of good formative assessment developed as a result. In this phase of the research project, the students were given explicit instruction on summative, formative and criterion-based assessment, in a series of classes developed by Penny Niven. At the end of this series, Wilhelm Meyer conducted focus group interviews with twelve students in an attempt to assess the success of the experiment in creating a heightened awareness of formative criterion-based assessment practices in order that they would understand and therefore utilise formative feedback on their writing.

ABSTRACT: Formative Assessment (FA) and Summative Assessment (SA) constitute two indispensable parts of any effective assessment system. As FA was proposed as an alternative to SA, there has been an academic concern about their relationship since the birth of these two concepts. Although many well-known studies have been carried out for FA, or, SA, or both, there has been contrasting views and misunderstandings about the relationship between FA and SA. It is argued in this paper that the confused relationship between FA and SA stems from the fact that it is either conceptualized from the perspective of function or from the perspective of process alone. The relation between FA and SA is very fine, far from clear-cut and a clarified relation between them is necessary for both our right understanding of FA and SA as well as the realization of the balance between FA and SA in practice as advocated by many educational policies. This paper aims to: (1) carry out an analysis of the function-based perspective and process-based perspective; and (2) re-conceptualize the relationship between them by combining the two perspectives together. The study results suggest that: (1) both FA and SA are, first of all, assessment and therefore share the same neutral assessment processes of elicitation of learning evidence, interpretation of evidence, and use of assessment results; (2) the purpose governs the how each process should be carried out and the extent to which summative or formative function is performed depends the how the processes are carried out; and (3) formative use of SA is more feasible than summative use of FA in practice. KEY WORDS: Relationship between formative assessments, function perspective, process perspective, contrasting views, misunderstandings, and re-conceptualize. About the Author: Huang Jian is a Lecturer at the School of Foreign Studies CUFE (Central University of Finance and Economics) in Beijing, China. Address: 39 South College Road, Haidian District, Beijing, People Republic of China, 100081. E-mail: summerofhj@sina.com How to cite this article? Jian, Huang. (2015). “Reconceptualization of the Relationship between Formative Assessment and Summative Assessment” in EDUCARE: International Journal for Educational Studies , Vol.8(1) August, pp.1-10. Bandung, Indonesia: Minda Masagi Press and UMP Purwokerto, ISSN 1979-7877. Chronicle of the article: Accepted (February 16, 2015); Revised (April 21, 2015); and Published (August 25, 2015).

Assessing generally refers to the process of gathering information about a person relative to specific competencies and other attributes, in formal or informal learning contexts. This should lead to valid and reliable inferences about competency levels, which in turn may be used for diagnostic and/or predictive purposes. Too often, classroom and other high-stakes assessments are used for purposes of grading, promotion, and placement, but not to enhance learning. In this chapter, we focus on formative assessment which posits that assessment should (a) encourage and support, not undermine, the learning process for learners and teachers; (b) provide formative information whenever possible (i.e., give useful feedback during the learning process instead of a single judgment at the end); and (c) be responsive to what is known about how people learn, generally and developmentally. This type of assessment has as its primary goal improvement of learning, which is critical to support the kinds of learning outcomes and processes necessary for students to succeed in the twenty-first century. It is referred to as “formative assessment,” or assessment for learning, in contrast to “summative assessment” (or assessment of learning). This chapter overviews the role of formative assessment in education generally, and also touches on stealth assessment specifically—an ­evidence-based approach to weaving assessments directly into learning environments (Shute, Computer games and instruction. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers, 2011).

The 1996 UNESCO report on the four pillars of education notes that one of the dangers of formal or in-school education systems is the tendency to emphasize the attainment of knowledge at the expense of other types of learning. However, assessment systems are not independent from the larger educational systems within which they operate. Teachers, school leaders, and other education personnel are often responding to both nature of assessments and the use of assessment results. Assessment systems tend to employ combinations of both formative and summative assessment, or assessment for learning and assessment of learning. There is significant scholarship taking place in recent years focused on the interplay of formative assessment, student self-regulation, and co-regulation of learning, all of which can contribute to students’ opportunities to learn to know, to do, to live together and to be. However, it is also important to acknowledge the ways in which high-stakes assessments can influence what happens in classrooms, and cause certain classroom practices to be amplified. Whether this amplification has a positive or negative influence on learning depends often on the nature of those summative assessments and the degree to which “teaching to the test” is likely to engage teachers and students in practices that are supportive of deeper learning. This chapter explores research on assessment systems and what is needed for assessment systems to support the types of learning emphasized in the UNESCO report.

Currently, online learning becomes a new trend in the Indonesian education. But, the educators are not ready to adapt to online learning, especially in online learning assessments. This study aims to describe the alternative assessments in online learning that can be implemented at elementary education along with its advantages and disadvantages. This study employed a qualitative approach with the literature review method. Researchers collected a number of reputable national and international journal articles, textbooks, handbooks, regulations, and so on from the google scholar database, science direct, eric, and others related to research problems and objectives. The analysis of the literature review uses the critical appraisal method. The results of this study showed that online learning assessments that can be implemented in elementary education were formative and summative assessments. It included cognitive assessments, performance assessments, portfolios, writings and journals, self-assessment and peers-assessments. The use of online learning assessments has many advantages such as the availability to conduct tests on demand and at any time, provides direct feedback to users, the students’ quick access to the test results, and a more accurate measurement of student learning. However, online assessment systems also have several drawbacks, such as students who have low information technology (IT) skills might be disadvantaged. For this reason, in implementing online learning and assessment, teachers and students should master information and communication technology skills.

Covid-19 pandemic required learning to be done online. Likewise, the assessment had to be done online. This study intended to examine the assessment of writing skills on online learning in Senior High School (SMA) in Denpasar. The study was a qualitative approach with a structured interview. Eight questions were asked to an English teacher to explore how the writing assessment in online learning done by the teacher. The findings showed that the teacher already understood the importance of assessment and already done the authentic assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment. However, in assessing the writing, several aspects such as the organization of the writing, discourse, and mechanics (punctuation, spelling, and capitalization) were not assessed by the teacher. Additionally, the teacher faced some obstacles in terms of plagiarism/originality of students’ writing and time management in conducting writing assessments on online learning. To solve this problem, the teacher warned the students about plagiarism and used an online plagiarism checker to check the authenticity of student work. Furthermore, to solve the problem of time-management teachers divided the time strictly between planning, teaching, and assessing. The research suggested that there is a need to conduct training for teachers to do online assessment,s especially on writing skills.

Assessment is considered the central part of the educational process. At least five categories exist in which it is possible to classify the evaluation procedures which are singled-out by the common name of assessment: placement, formative, diagnostic and summative assessment (Airasian,1975; Gronlund,1985) and self-assessment. Placement assessment is concerned with the identification of students’ entry level for class enrollment and selection. Therefore, placement assessment is aimed at determining both prerequisite skills and mastery of course contents/objectives. Formative assessment is used to provide ongoing monitoring of student progress which may be used by the teacher to gather feedback in order to adjust the educational process, to insure that learning is occurring and to correct learning errors. Formative evaluation is an integral part of everyday instruction (King and Rowe,1997). Diagnostic assessment begins where formative assessment leaves off. Diagnostic evaluation is concerned with “the identification of persistent or recurring learning difficulties that are left unresolved by the standard correction perspective of formative evaluation” (Gronlund,1985). Diagnostic evaluation may be conducted through two classes of tests: extensive and intensive. While intensive diagnostic tests focus on just one aspect of learning, extensive tests cover a broader range of contents and are characterized by a graded sampling of the concepts and knowledge to be assessed. Broad areas of difficulty may be identified and the points where a student’s understanding falters may be indicated, if the grading of the questions is sensitive. Summative evaluation comes at the end of units or courses and aims to assign grades to certify the students’ global level of knowledge on the topics taught. An important side effect of summative evaluation is the production of useful information on the course such as clarity of lectures, completeness and integration of the proposed concepts and arguments in order to provide the teacher with feedback.

E-assessment is an important component of e-learning and e-qualification. Formative and summative assessment serve different purposes and both types of evaluation are critical to the pedagogical process. While students are studying, practicing, working, or revising, formative assessment provides direction, focus, and guidance. Summative assessment provides the means to evaluate a learner’s achievement and communicate that achievement to interested parties. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a statistical method for inferring meaning from a text. Applications based on LSA exist that provide both summative and formative assessment of a learner’s work. However, the huge computational needs are a major problem with this promising technique. This paper explains how LSA works, describes the breadth of existing applications using LSA, explains how LSA is particularly suited to e-assessment, and proposes research to exploit the potential computational power of the Grid to overcome one of LSA’s drawbacks.

This study investigated the beliefs and practices of university lecturers around assessment theories and their links with teaching practices. Given the discrepancies in the literature, the research explored the gap in theoretical understandings of summative and formative assessment and the relationship between them, as well as the relationship with lecturers’ own practices. In total, 109 lecturers from a Colombian institution of higher education participated. An instrument consisting mainly of quantitative questions, with some qualitative questions, which was originally designed to investigate these beliefs and practices among higher education lecturers in England, was used. The translation, validation and reliability processes of the instrument were carried out. Thus, an exploratory factorial study was performed to establish the dimensions of the instrument, determining seven factors. The results indicate discrepancies between what lecturers understand by formative and summative assessment and their practices in the classroom. This coincides with the theoretical contradictions also found in the analysis of specialised literature. It is concluded that a detailed understanding of the discrepancies between beliefs and practices would be valuable in redesigning the ways in which the training of lecturers’ assessment competencies is approached.

This article reports findings from a small project run within the Robert Gordon University that aims to provide nursing students with online support for medicine dosage calculations through formative assessment. The project motivation is discussed together with an evaluation of a subset of data from 177 student participants. This evaluation focuses on the 20 or so students who have engaged most with the project, and assesses the extent to which these students have been able to transfer benefits derived from formative assessment of their skills to summative assessment. Evidence is presented that shows: students who do well formatively do not seek individual tuition, those who truly engage with the formative online assessment subsequently pass their summative assessment, students agree or strongly agree that the formative assessment helped them pass their summative assessment and students making multiple attempts do not simply copy the correct answers given in feedback, but retry the assessment.

This study responds to critical knowledge gaps evident in current literature about how formative assessment is enacted by foundation phase teachers in mathematics in South African public schools. Furthermore, the literature study revealed that most of the current research conducted in public primary schools focused on learner performance with emphasis on summative assessment, hence delimiting the importance of formative assessment as a strategic tool in improving learner performance. The aim of this study was to explore how grade three teachers enact formative assessment in mathematics teaching. I therefore investigated teachers’ understanding of formative assessment, what teachers know about how children learn mathematics, how teachers use their knowledge of children’s thinking to plan and enact formative assessment and what support is needed by grade three teachers to enact formative assessment in mathematics classrooms. Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as propounded in third generation activity theory (AT) by Engeström (1987) served as the analytical framework for this study. Third generation AT which focuses on the interaction between a person or group (subject), a goal, motivation, or problem (object) and mediational interaction with (tools) as well as the intersection with the activity system leading to (outcome/s). This heuristic assisted me to conduct a systemic analysis of all inter-dependencies that had a bearing on how grade 3 teachers enacted formative assessment and what additional support they required to enact formative assessment in mathematics classrooms. This study followed a case study research design through a qualitative research approach. I started with a sample of 12 teachers in a selected school district in Tshwane in the Gauteng Province. The teachers were selected through a convenience sampling technique. The data was collected through two focus group interviews from these twelve teachers (divided into six each) as a pilot exploration. I then selected four teachers through purposive sampling. Data was collected through lesson observation, document analysis and four stimulated recall interviews from these four teachers. The data was analysed through content analysis technique, utilising Microsoft Macros which assisted me to segment all the data. I thereafter conducted pattern matching of the data. Finally, the data was coded, categorised and thematised. The core finding demonstrated that,although teachers know about how children learn and that they can align their teaching to how children learn, they struggle to enact formative assessment effectively. Furthermore, while teachers recognise the importance of formative assessment, they do not implement formative assessment skills in an integrated way. The core finding of the study was that teachers’ formative assessment practices are constrained by tensions of the activity system. This study contributes to the body of knowledge of formative assessment by highlighting relevant discords around challenges and successes pertaining to the enactment of formative assessment. The study also contributes to the research methodological body of knowledge on classroom observation of formative assessment where researchers will be able to replicate this study in different contexts. Finally, the study contributes by way of recommending strategies to policy makers and curriculum designers and education planners on the need to integrate formative assessment in a balanced way focusing on assessment for learning to enhance the quality of teaching and learning, hence improving learners’ performance.

Online assessment is an evaluation of a person's abilities, behaviors, and characteristics conducted over the Internet by use of available web technologies such as Learning Management Systems (LMS). Online assessments support a variety of question types and provide tailored feedback useful in improving learning and academic achievement of the learners. Online teaching and assessment had not been popular in some parts of the world, prior the COVID-19 pandemic. However with the pandemic, learning was taken online necessitating the need to make a move towards the computerization of assessment. In Kenya, this was done in a hurry without training learners on how to handle both online learning and assessment. As a result many students were apprehensive of these processes and were resisting the shift. This study provides University of Kabianga second year students’ perspective on formative online assessment. Study was based on the Constructivist Theory of learning which holds that, learners construct knowledge and learn best when engaged in learning experiences rather than passively receiving information. Only an experience can facilitate students to construct their own knowledge. Students in this study were exposed to online assessment for the first time and their perception and satisfaction was given in a feedback survey tool emended in the LMS. Analysis of students’ feedback indicated that they were satisfied and preferred online assessment to the face-to-face written assessments. Keywords: Online Assessment, Perception, Formative Assessment DOI: 10.7176/JEP/13-32-09 Publication date: November 30 th 2022

Although assessment generally yields a written product, it also is a process that employs a systematic method through which information is gathered, reviewed, and then applied in conjunction with theory to gain a better understanding of the subject of focus. Assessment is essential to social work practice no matter the social worker’s role, the nature of the interaction or practice setting, client population, or phase of the helping process. It is used to gather evidence to understand presenting problems, to evaluate progress and outcomes, and to assess the effectiveness of interventions and programs. Assessment is also an integral part of social work education and consists of appraisal of student learning and the effectiveness of curricula, pedagogy, and programs in preparing students for social work practice. Assessment in social work practice is threaded throughout all of its activities and employs a plethora of models and frameworks. Assessment is a core activity in social work practice with individuals, families, groups, organizations, or communities. Initial assessments (also referred to as terms such as diagnostic, intake, or psychosocial assessments at an individual or family level) are utilized to gain a comprehensive understanding of a client’s circumstances, difficulties, and assets and to determine a subsequent course of action or intervention plan. The scope of this initial assessment may be narrow or broad, depending on factors such as the client system (individuals vs. communities), the role of the social worker, and the purpose of the assessment. Work with individuals traditionally includes a bio-psychosocial assessment—and more recently bio-psycho-sociocultural-spiritual assessment. Other types of assessments in social work practice with groups or communities are those that gather data related to need, risk, assets, strengths, and capacity-building. Although it is usually initiated at the point of engagement of the social worker, assessment should be thought of as a dynamic and occurring throughout the helping or change process to account for new developments and emerging considerations and conducted in partnership with the client. Assessment in social work is also employed to measure progress toward goal achievement and final outcomes, often referred to as practice evaluation. Both practice and social work education utilize formative and summative assessment approaches in order to appraise program or intervention impact as well as student learning. Formative and summative assessment may utilize similar data collection methods but are differentiated according to purpose and use of the data. Formative assessments are developmental and used to shape and enhance student learning, interventions, or new programs. Summative assessment focuses on the end product—or impact of a program or intervention and outcomes achieved. Ideally, both formative and summative methods of assessment are employed in practice and education. Both can involve feedback from clients, staff, etc., as well as use validated measures or assessment artifacts and can be used to shape intervention or education efforts.