Formative and Summative Assessment

Formative and Summative Assessment

Greetings, friends! 

Before this week, I really did not know the effectiveness of assessments. In high school, I definitely saw the way teachers did Summative assessments at the end of a semester or year but never really noticed a Formative assessment.

Now that I have a much better idea on the concepts of both formative and summative assessments, my philosophy now is that Formative assessments are more important then Summative. The reason being that Formative assessment is ongoing, it never stops. Formative is also descriptive and helps discover the goal and will close the gap on problems in learning and gets a better idea of where the student is at in whatever the subject is.

Here is a great blog by Rebecca Alber that explains why Formative assessments matter: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/formative-assessments-importance-of-rebecca-alber

The blog is not long but it does hit many key points on the importance of formative assessment and goes a little beyond what we were assigned to read and watch. I encourage you to check it out!

Honestly, I was more impressed with eduCanon than Pear Deck. What I really like about eduCanon was the Question-by-Question Break Down. I thought that was really fun and interactive. The format of the site was really cool and like I said, the way it is so interactive makes it so effective. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't that I did not like Pear Deck. I thought the imagery was really neat on that site but from messing around with the sites, eduCanon was more fun and a tool that I could see myself as future teacher using this for my class.

What struck me most about Scott's presentation was the diagram of The Learning Cycle. This gave such a great visual on the importance and concept of Formative assessment. This diagram really grasps that learning has no end. 

Here is a cool article you can download as a PDF on the importance of The Learning Cycle that gives great insight and description on what it is and how we use it:

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/program/education/us/en/documents/assessing-projects/overview-and-benefits/assessment-throughout-learning-cycle.pdf

I encourage you friends to let me know what you think and I am excited to read your blogs as well!

-Mark