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I come not to bury summative assessments but to

praise them

Kathleen Porter-Magee (/about-us/fordham-staff/kathleen-porter-magee)

February 10, 2012

The Northwest Evaluation Association recently surveyed parents and teachers

(http://www.nwea.org/sites/www.nwea.org/files/PressReleaseAssessmentPerceptions.pdf) to

gauge their support for various types of

assessment. The

results (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/02/08/21tests.h31.html) indicated that just a quarter of

teachers find summative

assessments “‘extremely’ or ‘very’ valuable for determining whether students

have a deep understanding of content.” By contrast, 67 percent of teachers (and

85 percent of parents) found formative and interim assessments extremely or

very valuable.

I can understand why teachers would find formative and

interim assessments appealing. After all, teachers generally either create those

assessments themselves, or are at least intimately involved with their

creation. And they are, therefore, more flexible tools that can be tweaked

depending on, for instance, the pace of classroom instruction.

But, while formative and interim assessments are

critically important and should be used to guide instruction and planning, they

cannot and should not be used to replace summative assessments, which play an

equally critical role in a standards-driven system.

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Formative and

interim assessments

cannot and should

not be used to

replace summative

assessments.

Everyone has a

Summative assessments are designed to evaluate whether

students have mastered knowledge and skills at a particular point in time. For

instance, a teacher might give a summative assessment at the end of a unit to

determine whether students have learned what they needed to in order to move

forward.

Similarly, and end-of-course or end-of-year summative assessment can help

determine whether students mastered the content and skills outlined in a

state’s standards for that grade.

If you believe that we need standards to ensure that all

students—regardless of their zip code or socioeconomic status—need to learn

the

same essential content and be held to the same standards, than it’s essential

to have an independent gauge that helps teachers, parents, administrators, and

leaders understand where students are not reaching the goals we’ve set out for

them.

Unfortunately, the NWEA survey does not make this clear,

opting instead to narrowly define summative assessments only as “state or

district-wide standardized tests that measure grade-level proficiency, and

end-of-year subject or course exams.”

It’s hard to imagine many teachers who are going to be

enthusiastic about the current “state or district-wide standardized tests” in

use, which often include low-quality questions and the results of which typically

don’t reach teachers until it’s too late to do anything with them. And so, by

defining summative assessments in the particular rather than the general, the

NWEA findings tell us less about how teachers feel about the value of summative

assessments writ large, and more about how they feel about the current crop of

state tests, which pretty much everyone agrees need significant improvement.

What’s more, everyone has a natural bias in favor of the

things they create themselves. And so, it’s unsurprising that teachers find the

assessments that they create and score (in real time) more useful than tests

that are created and scored centrally.

Yet, having a set of common standards—whether common to

all schools within a state, or common across all states—requires some

independent measure of student learning. There needs to be some gauge—for

8/4/2014 I come not to bury summative assessments but to praise them | The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

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natural bias in favor

of the

things they create

themselves.

teachers, administrators, and parents—that helps show whether classroom

instruction, materials, and even formative and interim assessments are

aligned

to the state standards in terms of both content and rigor. And to help teachers

and parents understand whether, in the end, students learned the essential

content and skills they needed each year.

Of course, shifting the focus from teacher-created

assessments to centrally-developed state (or even district) assessments is

difficult. And many teachers will resist being judged by something they had no

hand in creating, and realigning instruction around standards that may look

different from what they’ve taught in their classrooms for years.

In

the end, if we want standards-driven reform to work, we need to get summative assessments right. Trading summative

assessments for formative assessments isn’t an option. They are different tools

with very different roles in the system. That means policymakers and education

leaders need to do a far better job of soliciting teacher feedback on these

assessment tools and they need to focus much more time and attention on

delivering high-quality professional development that helps teachers use the

data effectively to guide planning, instruction, and formative assessment

development. But it also means that teachers in standards-driven schools need

to accept that student learning will be measured by something other than the

observations and assessments created within the four walls of their schools.