Understanding Rhode Island Assessment (continued)

How to Assess?   

Decisions about which assessment instrument or approach to use depends on the different combinations of answers to the basic who, what, when and why assessment questions.  

Formative and Summative Assessments

• Formative Assessments are assessments that provide the teacher and students with information about student learning during the teaching-learning process. They supply information that helps teachers know whether students are understanding what is being taught so that they can change, reteach or teach differently.  Formative Assessments also gives students an opportunity to ask questions for clarification and understanding before a summative assessment is given. 
• Summative Assessments provide results that reflects the entire designated period of learning and are administered following the completion of a major activity or time period (end of unit, monthly, quarterly, end of semester or course).  

EXAMPLE:  The need to monitor student progress in reading could lead to a decision by a teacher to use a record of oral reading (formative assessment). This assessment details a student’s reading behaviors as he/she reads text orally. This same need to monitor student progress in reading could lead to a decision by the principal to have teachers administer a set of pre-selected text to all students in grade 2 four times a year (summative assessment).

Types of Assessment Instruments and Techniques 

Determining the purpose for an assessment is the first step when deciding what kind of assessment to use.  Then, it is important to consider how formal, or standardized, the design of the test instrument or technique, the administration conditions and the scoring process need to be in order to get valid and reliable results for that purpose.. Assessment approaches can be divided into two groups based on the degree of standardization:  

1. those that have been developed, by the district or a group of teachers or companies, and standardized in terms of content, and/or administration procedures, and/or scoring procedures, called formal assessments; and
2.  those that have been developed by a classroom teacher for use in his or her classroom, called informal assessments.

Some approaches could be either formal or informal, depending on the degree of standardization of content, administration procedures, or scoring procedures.  Indeed, some teacher-created activities or tests are quite standardized on all three of these aspects.  This table provides only a few examples that distinguish assessments according to how standardized they are or could be.