Читать книгу Student Engagement Techniques - Elizabeth F. Barkley - Страница 57

Summative assessment is the summary evaluation at the end of a topic, unit, or program for “auditing” purposes, usually to produce a grade. It is essentially “product”-focused. Tests are the traditional vehicle for this type of assessment. Formative assessment is more process-oriented and developmental in nature. Its primary purpose is to provide feedback that encourages adjustments and corrections. Classroom assessment techniques, for example, provide individual college teachers with a variety of ways to determine how well their students are engaged in learning. Whatever means teachers use to assess engagement in their classes, gathering appropriate feedback can help to close the gap between what teachers think is happening in their classes and what students are actually experiencing. Both summative and formative types of assessment are valuable and necessary and, in practice, often blended.

A term used by Grant Wiggins (1998) that seems to incorporate both summative and formative aspects is educative assessment. Educative assessment is deliberately designed to promote as well as measure learning. Critical elements include identifying and communicating learning goals to students, specifying the criteria or evidence that will be used to determine whether the students have met the goals, and providing students with rich, timely, individually relevant feedback that provides opportunities for intervention and adjustment before it is too late (pp. 12–13). We have a similar definition of assessment in our book titled Learning Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (Barkley & Major, 2016); we view learning assessment as a seamless approach to teaching, learning, and assessment. As we see it, when done well, students should not be able to distinguish whether they are being taught or assessed.