School-set assessments are typically referred to as being either formative or summative. People debate what those two things mean, but I think the following would be fairly commonly accepted:

• ‍Formative assessment occurs during the learning process, focuses on improvement (rather than evaluation) and is often informal and low-stakes. (Baylor Academy for Teaching and Learning)‍
• Summative assessments evaluate student learning, knowledge, proficiency, or success at the conclusion of an instructional period, like a unit, course, or program. (Yale’s Poorvu Centre)

At first glance that sounds like a clear distinction, but in practice they group together a range of diverse and overlapping approaches.

I can think of at least seven different types of in-school assessment, and I don’t think it helps to think of any of them as simply formative or summative:

1. Informal assessment

Teachers assess all the time — often without setting up the process as an assessment in the eyes of students. For example, if you ask students a question and get them all to write the answer on a mini whiteboard, you’re assessing them. And, providing you’re walking round the room to check responses, you’re gathering valuable formative information from that process.

2. Quiz

Teachers may start a lesson with five questions to answer as a “do now”, or they may insert a 10 question vocabulary test in the middle of a lesson. This isn’t completely ad hoc — those questions will probably have been chosen in advance as part of some broader curriculum plan. Questions may relate to things taught in that class, or the day before, or they may relate to concepts taught some time ago for retrieval practice. Nonetheless, the stakes are still pretty low, and the insights from the assessments may not offer much value beyond that lesson / homework.

3. Teacher judgment

Sometimes you may structure an assessment as a set of teacher judgments against a set of criteria. The pupil may not have contributed any specific responses or piece of work on which to base the assessment; instead you’re parsing a range of experiences of the child and reaching a conclusion on their performance level. For example, an Early Years rubric could include the criterion “Willing to try out new things”, and the teacher may award a grade of “demonstrated” or “not demonstrated”.

4. Unit assessment

You may want to start a unit with a diagnostic test of prior knowledge, and/or end it with a test evaluating understanding of the content taught during the unit. Either way the overriding purpose here is to provide information to a teacher to help them ensure the unit is taught effectively. If they spot gaps in prior knowledge coming into the unit, they can spend more time teaching that during the unit. If they spot weaknesses in the end of unit assessment they can reteach the content before moving on.

5. Periodic assessments

Most schools have an assessment calendar prescribing a more formal assessment 1–3 times per year. The questions on these assessments may be a bit longer and more complex than those delivered in a-d above. They also have slightly higher stakes — a grade may be shared with parents, or used for setting, or shared with leaders and governing bodies. They’re also sometimes standardised (but I don’t think standardised assessments are a category in their own right — it’s more of a technique to improve the quality of the insights you can glean from that assessment by benchmarking to a broader sample).

6. Rubric assessment

Sometimes you may want to assess a child for a bigger piece of work: an essay, or a project for example. You’ll have a rubric that helps you arrive at a consistent set of grades and/or feedback.

7. National assessments

These are things like SATs, GCSEs and A Levels. They come at the end of course and typically don’t feed into a process of continuous teaching and re-teaching. If you do badly, there may be repercussions (e.g. it may impact on what subsequent courses you can take), but unless you’re doing resits, the assessment is unlikely to play much part in a teacher’s thinking about how to teach you subsequently.

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Of course you could frame and subdivide these differently — I debated whether to split (4) into two, for example; and diagnostic assessment could be considered a category of assessment in its own right. But that’s kind of my point: if we just lump them into the categories of formative and summative we lose all this important nuance. The labels imply that every assessment is either one or the other. But that’s clearly not the case with the above.

For example I usually see (4) referred to as a form of formative assessment, because it’s mainly used by the teacher to inform the learning process. But it’s also clearly summative, since you’re assessing either what’s come before or the end of something (a unit). And (5) would typically get referred to as summative, but there’s a tonne of formative information you can (and really should) extract from those assessments! At Smartgrade we’ve put a lot of time into thinking about how to get meaningful formative insights from periodic assessments into the hands of teachers, so while I know people sometimes think of us as their “summative assessment platform”, I’d hate that to mean that they don’t spend time thinking about those assessments’ formative value.

One byproduct of the overuse of the terms “formative” and “summative” is that school assessment policies often lack sufficient detail to be meaningful. Here’s the kind of thing you see quite often in school assessment policies (I read about 20 while writing this blog and so while I didn’t want to pick on specific schools, the following is very much “inspired by true events”):

“Formative Assessment is also known as Assessment for Learning and is used to form a detailed picture of children’s knowledge, as well as to check for understanding against specific learning outcomes.”

Great, but how? What specifically do you expect your teachers to do with this in terms of their classroom practice?

I’d love to see policies dwell less on the definitions and more on the techniques. For instance, you could instead say “We encourage teachers to start lessons with a 5–10 question ‘Do Now’ quiz containing content from the previous lesson / previous homework / learning from earlier in the academic year”.

The final point I want to make is that understanding the types of assessments you want to do in your school at a more granular level is super-important when it comes to choosing software. I don’t really think there is such a thing as a “formative assessment software platform”, because there are just too many concepts sharing that definition, and no platform does all of them well. I’m a co-founder of two products, and they both can solve multiple (but mostly different) problems from the list above:

• Smartgrade has historically been used for the kind of periodic assessments I describe in (5) above, though increasingly we’re also finding the system is being used by our partner programmes, schools and MATs for the unit assessments I describe in (4) too. We think that’s great: the software lends itself to both tasks very well via online and offline assessment features. But I wouldn’t expect (or advise) a school to use Smartgrade for the types of assessment described in (1) or (2) above.‍
• Carousel Learning excels at the kind of assessment described in (1) and (2) above — and like Smartgrade is also being used increasingly for the kinds of unit assessments described in (d) (again: great!). But it wouldn’t really work for the periodic assessments described in (e).

I want to end by making clear that none of this is meant to sound snooty about people who do use the terms formative and summative: I know I still refer to them myself frequently. I’m just making a plea for us to see them as overlapping adjectives that are part of our assessment lexicon, and not as distinct and all-encompassing categories. Describing all assessment as EITHER formative OR summative is like trying to categorise music as EITHER rock OR pop — the terms have distinctive connotations, but they’re not binary!

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