What is the difference?
If you are anything like me, every time my colleague or superior mentions "formative assessment", a fear runs down my spine. At times I confused it with summative assessment. In this post, I aim to quickly and loosely define them.
Formative assessment
Formative assessment is aimed towards providing quality feedback, gudiance and comments for the teacher or student. This information is then used to improve the teaching and learning.
One example of formative assessment is a simple periodic questioning of students during a lesson is a way for the teacher to check if the teaching of a concept was effective.
Summative assessment
Summative assessment is like a final judgement or grading of work. Examples would be the O Levels or N Levels.
Conclusion
While summative assessments are inevitable as part of national examinations, we as teachers should also seek to add formative assessments to our framework.
In fact the two are not mutually exclusive -- we can use our common test as a way to inform students of their current abilities by adjusting our lessons to suit their deficiencies.
