Formative-Summative assessment: similarities and differences

While all assessments involve questions about validity, reliability, usefulness and cost, different assessment intentions lead to such different answers that there is a strong case for regarding feedout and feedback assessment as different systems. When the intention is to create feedback, learners need to be willing participants who disclose their uncertainties, errors and lacunae. Where feedout is the goal, disclosure is displaced by deception. Players in assessment games need to know which rules apply and there is little room to apply both sets to the same task. Not only do summative and formative assessments instantiate different rules of engagement, because they have different intentions, they also have different rules of evidence. Similarities are identified in the following list:
1. Assessors look for evidence of achievement.
2. Judgements are made about the match between evidence and criteria. In many cases conclusions are much less reliable, because the goodness of fit between evidence and criteria has to be inferred.
3. Judgement invokes communication. Some assessment judgements are relatively low stakes, may be fuzzy and exploratory and conversational in character, as in a discussion amongst peers or in dialogue with a tutor. In such cases there is often space on all sides for meanings to be negotiated and clarified. High stakes assessments are marked by unequal power relations between assessor and assessed, the format is not conversational and the judgement may be in a highly symbolic form, such as a number or letter grade, that is capable of multiple decodings. Understood as communications, summative and formative assessment are very different. The former is about conveying information, while the latter is more hermeneutic.
4. Judgements are economic processes. When people are assessing or being assessed, it is at the expense of doing other things. Stress (amongst teachers and learners) and dysfunctional behaviours (of which surface learning strategies can be one) are common consequences. And although formative assessment is intended to enrich the learning economy, summative assessment’s contribution to learning is less palpable.

Copied from
Knight, P. (2002). Summative assessment in higher education: practices in disarray. Studies in Higher Education, 27.3, pp. p275-86.