Here’s What Summative Assessments in the Classroom Should Look Like

A comprehensive look at what effective summative assessments look like in any classroom.

As part of classroom society, assessments provide important feedback on learning, and they can generally be categorized either as formative or summative.

In understanding assessments, come on a journey with me as I look at how these assessments are defined, their connection to skills building through proper questions, and what they should look like in both the traditional and online classrooms.

The Purpose of Summative Assessments

Before getting to the summative assessments, let’s look how assessments are defined through their intended purpose in the classroom.

Formative assessments are done with the purpose of having the teacher “form” an understanding towards students’ strengths and weaknesses.

These type of assessments are carried out multiple times in the classroom and in many ways, with the basic form being through asking questions.

Using these assessments, teachers can then provide feedback to students to help them succeed academically. They are considered informal and on-going.

Once teachers use assessments to understand their students better, then they can begin to introduce differentiated instruction methods to help students be at their best.

With summative assessments, the root word of sum or “total” means that the intent of this assessment is to conclude a student’s overall understanding on a particular chapter or unit of study.

The most common type of summative assessments are:

• chapter or unit tests
• mid-term exams
• final exams
• final projects
• final presentations

These types of assessment are considered formal, and feedback is only offered in certain situations.

For example, if the teacher decides to offer it to the entire class, or to individual students who seek it out, or to the student who is at risk of failing the class.

The Connection Between Formative and Summative Assessments

Effective assessments, whether they be formative or summative in nature, should always strive to do one thing — to motivate and inspire students to be the best they can be with their abilities.

Teachers who offer feedback to students during their formative assessments may find that the results of the summative assessments are much higher.

Offering feedback can be in the form of support statements such as “excellent”, or “bravo” when students answer correctly, or “not exactly” or “let’s think about it from a different perspective” when students answer incorrectly.

Teachers should often have students explain how they got to their answer and especially to write it down.

This is another form of offering feedback.

The one math teacher who got me to love math after many years of me hating it always stressed to me the following — “I care more about how you got to the answer, than the answer itself”.

This is something I share with my students everyday.

When the teacher shows positive emotions towards learning and cares about going through the steps to show where students were right and where they were wrong in answering — students will respond in a more positive way.

So it’s important for teachers to recognize the benefits of formative assessments and in giving regular feed back to their students when it comes to summative assessments in helping to reduce student anxiety.

Summative Assessments and Student Anxiety

Summative assessments often bring anxiety to students.

Over the course of my teaching career I’ve found a couple of strategies that help to reduce student anxiety when it comes to summative assessments.

I. Acknowledge Anxiety as Something Real

When teachers acknowledge anxiety around taking summative assessments is real and have discussions with students around it prior to the assessment, students can take comfort that in acknowledging their anxiety, they don’t let it overcome them during the assessment.

II. Tell a Relatable Tale

Teachers were once students, and so teachers can relate their own horror stories of dealing with summative assessments to help reduce student anxiety. Doing so can bring a sense of togetherness between teachers and students because students can learn from the teacher’s mistakes.

I have one.

In my early university days, I had assumed my math exam was in the same location as all my other exams. Low and behold I came to the horrible realization that it was in another building way across the other side of the campus and getting there on foot was not an option. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who made this mistake.

Togehter with some other anxiety riddled students we hopped into a small car, sped through a red light, no other cars were around, don’t worry, and made it to the exam only about 15 minutes late.

Lessons learned: always be prepared, check the exam schedule, and never assume!

III. Teach Valuable Strategies

Knowing how best to approach taking or presenting a summative assessment can also help to reduce anxiety.

When students come prepared knowing the strategies to answering questions on a test, as a summative assessment, they won’t fear the words on the page, becuase they know what information to look for by eliminating irrelevant information.

When summtive assessments come in the form of presenttions or projects, students must also show that they benefit from doing presentations or projects, especially now that there are tools that can do the technical work for them.

Professional Development Video for Teachers

Below is an educational video I creaated to highlight what I see are the proper approaches to using summative assessments in the classroom. This is part one of a series of videos I created on summative assessments.

If you enjoyed this video, please like it and subscribe to my YouTube channel — The ETI Academy.

What Summative Assessments Should Look Like

Whether teachers use summative assessments in the traditional (in-person) classroom, or the online classroom, summative assessments should be given in a way that benefits the students learning.

If students believe that a summative assessment is just there to gather marks, this opens the door to cheating, because after all, it has been commuicated that what matters is only the final mark.

Students, therefore, will try to get the highest score possible by any means necessary.

The online learning environment makes it easier to cheat.

Therefore, methods of summative assessments need to change.

The key is to have more open-ended cumulative tasks over traditional test questions such as multiple choice, matching, or fill-in-the-blanks.

Open-ended questions are harder to cheat from than closed-ended questions.

Some examples of summative tasks that can replace traditional test questions include;

• presentations
• writing essays
• questions around why

In the end, if students are going to cheat they will try regardless if it’s in the traditional classroom or in the online classroom.

In order to minimize this from happening in either classroom, teachers need to emphasize to students the consequences for anyone caught cheating before beginning the actual assessments.

One other strategy that works in trying to stop students from cheating during an online assessment is to create the assessment with “how easy is it to cheat on this assessment” in mind!

Final Thoughts…

Assessments in education help guide policy decisions, and are meant to improve on teaching and learning strategies.

There is no one size fits all type of assessment as learners have different preferred styles of learning.

Summative assessments in education help give the necessary feedback to students when it comes to how well they understood the concepts in the unit.

Assessments also have the potential to build or destroy relationships between teachers and students.

Therefore it is important to acknowledge just how powerful assessments can be in the classroom and what the future of classrooms may look like in the future.

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