ASSESSMENT

INICIA / 2016

FORMATIVE V/S SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT

The assessment ofteachingandlearningcan be viewed as
two complementary and overlapping activities that aim to
benefit both the quality of student learning and the
professional development of the instructor.

Assessing teaching and learning can help instructors improve

and refine their teaching practices and help improve
students learning and performance.

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
The goal of formative assessment is to gather feedback that can be used by
the instructor and the students to guide improvements in the ongoing
teaching and learning context. These are low stakes assessments for students
and instructors.

Examples:
Asking students to submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a
lecture

Have students submit an outline for a paper.

Early course evaluations

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT
The goal of summative assessment is to measure the level of success or proficiency that
has been obtained at the end of an instructional unit, by comparing it against some
standard or benchmark.

Examples:
Assigning a grade to a final exam
Critique of a Senior recital
University Faculty Course Evaluations
The outcome of a summative assessment can be used formatively, however, when
students or faculty take the results and use them to guide their efforts and activities in
subsequent courses.

THE ASSESSMENT TRIANGLE

Assessment is the process of reasoning from evidence. To
design assessments of student learning that will provide
useful evidence requires that we coordinate and align three
key components:cognition, which refers to a model of the
thinking and learning of students within the subject
domain,observations, the tasks or activities that students
engage in that provide evidence of learning,
andinterpretations, the process or methods for making sense
of the evidence.

THE ASSESSMENT TRIANGLE

CLASSROOM ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES

General Characteristics
Geared to providing practice and general feedback that will improve student learning
Designed by the instructor to assess questions of particular concern in his/her course
Intended to assess the whole class understanding, not to evaluate individual learners
Tailored to content-specific objectives
Allows for ongoing feedback with relatively quick assessment tools

EXAMPLES
Minute Paper
Pose 1-2 questions in which students identify the most significant things they have learned from a given lecture,
discussion or assignment. The question can be very general or content specific and their answers help you to
determine if they are successfully identifying what you view as most important. Give students about 1-2 minutes
and ask them to write a response on an index card, or no longer than a half page.

Muddiest Point
Similar to the Minute Paper, ask your students to answer: What was the muddiest point in (todays lecture, the
reading, the home)? Students need to identify fairly quickly what they do not understand and articulate it.

Background Knowledge Probes

Create a short questionnaire to determine how much and what kind of relevant background knowledge students
bring to your course. Your goal might be identifying what is familiar to them or determining their level of recall from
prior related courses. Be sure to make the questionnaire anonymous and be clear that it is not a quiz and will not be
graded.

EXAMPLES
Applications Cards
Identify a concept or principle your students are studying and ask students to come
up with 1-3 applications of the principle from everyday experience, current news
events, or their knowledge of particular organizations or systems discussed in the
course.

Student-Generated Test Questions

A week or two prior to an exam, begin to write general guidelines about the kinds of
questions you plan to ask on the exam. Share those guidelines with your students
and ask them to write and answer 1-2 questions like those they expect to see on the
exam.

WHAT ARE RUBRICS?

A rubric is a scoring tool that explicitly represents the performance
expectations for an assignment or piece of work. A rubric divides the
assigned work into component parts and provides clear descriptions
of the characteristics of the work associated with each component, at
varying levels of mastery. Rubrics can be used for a wide array of
assignments: papers, projects, oral presentations, artistic
performances, group projects, etc. Rubrics can be used as scoring or
grading guides, to provide formative feedback to support and guide
ongoing learning efforts, or both.

CHECKLISTS AND RATING SCALES

Checklist: A checklist itemizes task descriptions in one column and provides a
space beside each item in a second column to check off the completion of the
task.

Rating Scales: Rating scales are similar to the checklists except that they
indicate the degree of accomplishment rather than just yes or no. Rating scales
list performance statements in one column and the range of accomplishment in
descriptive words, with or without numbers, in other columns. These other
columns form the scale and can indicate a range of achievement, such as
from poor to excellent, never to always, beginning to exemplary, or strongly
disagree to strongly agree.

USEFULNESS HOW / WHEN

Checklist: (1stStage)
Useful for identifying whether the key tasks in a procedure,
process, or activity have been completed.

Best used when introducing basic skills and not about the

quality of students work yet since its at the beginning stage

USEFULNESS HOW / WHEN

Rating Scales: (2ndStage)
Useful when students are beginning to take ownership of the

knowledge or skill acquired- moving on to their mastery level.

Rubric (3rdStage)
When the student is ready to move on to demonstrating deeper

understanding and is beginning to take charge of their own learning.

The purpose is not for giving grade but for assisting students
learning by providing descriptive feedback.

CREATING YOUR RUBRICS

Rubistar
Choose a topic and create a new rubric based on a template. Save and edit your rubric online.

Rubric Template
Insert the task and criteria into this template.

Rubric Template(Word doc)

Word document template to download and modify to meet authentic assessment needs (University of West
Florida).

Quick Rubric
iRubricdevelop rubrics and access them from anywhere
Annenberg Learner Build a Rubric
Single-Point Rubric(Word doc)
Rubric Generator
Build your own grading rubrics online by filling out a form. You can include a graphic and print the rubric.