STEM Course Design Series: Summative Assessment

All right, before we dive deeper into what we mean by summative assessment, let's contrast it with something else called formative assessment.

So there's these two major types, again, formative and summative.

Formative tends to be way to think about assessment for learning.

So this is practice.

This is small stakes or no stakes assignments, what you do in class, what you do out of class, ways for students to practice again and figure out can they or can they not do and achieve the objectives.

But it is all about practice.

It's typically not for a grade.

It's, again, just to give students opportunities to practice their learning.

So it's assessment for learning.

We contrast that with summative assessment.

So summative assessment is larger, bigger stakes, typically at the end of a unit or the end of the entire course, even think about final project or exam.

We call this assessment of learning.

So again, this is a way to check, can our students achieve the objectives or not? These are documented milestones throughout a course that show the assessment of a student's progress of their learning.

Both are very, very, very important for designing courses that are effective.

And when it comes to, again, formative assessment, that's the practice piece.

We're going to talk more about that later on in this series when we talk about different activities that happened before, during, and after class.

But for now, we'll talk about summative assessment.