Summative Assessment

Measuring Learning

Summative assessment helps teachers gauge how much their students have learned—especially over a given period of time. Summative assessment consists of a variety of different formats from multiple-choice exams to research papers to portfolios of student work.

Assigning grades at the end of a period of instruction has been the common purpose of assessment in schools for hundreds of years. It is almost as common today, especially in standards-based education. Standards define the knowledge, skills, or dispositions a student should learn in a given period of time or through a specific set of experiences. Summative assessments are designed to evaluate a student’s obtainment of the knowledge, skills, or dispositions outlined in the totality of the standard the summative assessment is measuring.

A key focus of standards-based summative assessment is attention to the verbs articulated in the standard. For example, if the learning standard in question states “students will evaluate historical arguments using primary sources,” the summative assessment will ask students to judge and determine the quality of historical arguments by using primary source evidence. As such, summative assessments focus on the criterion that defines what students are asked to do. Most often, instructors use this type of summative assessment to measure how much students learn in their individual classroom. Ask the “man on the street” to picture classroom assessment, and images of summative assessments like pop quizzes, unit tests, and finals come to mind. Until recently, almost all assessment in classrooms was summative. Its purpose was to assign a grade, differentiate students from each other, and separate good students from bad students. Although formative assessment has grown in popularity since the 1990s, summative assessment remains the predominate approach to evaluating student learning in classrooms. Summative assessment, however, is also used across classrooms to measure the overall quality of academic experiences. This form of summative assessment focuses on program quality and is taken up in the next section.

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