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Session 1. Why We Assess: Formative and Summative Purposes
Objective. Tell formative from summative assessment and match each classroom assessment moment to the decision it informs.
Every teacher already assesses all day: a glance at a face, a question, a marked notebook. The difference between busy checking and useful checking is the decision it feeds. In a 45-minute lesson there is time for about two or three short checks, so each one must earn its minutes. This session helps you see which checks change your teaching, which only fill the journal, and how to keep both in balance.
Key ideas
Assessment is about decisions
- Before you assess, ask: what decision will this result help me make? Re-teach, move on, group pupils, report to parents?
- A check with no decision attached is only paperwork. A check you act on tomorrow is teaching.
- Assessment, marking and grading are different: marking checks answers, grading gives a level, assessment is the whole process of finding out what pupils know.
Formative and summative
- Formative assessment happens during learning and is used to change what the teacher and pupil do next. It is usually low-stakes and often not graded.
- Summative assessment happens at the end of a unit, term or year and reports what pupils have achieved. It is often graded and recorded.
- The same task can be either. What decides is how the result is used: to report, or to change teaching.
Quick checks inside a 45-minute lesson
- Good formative checks take 1 to 5 minutes: mini-whiteboards held up together, a thumbs signal, an exit ticket with one question, a short walk round during seatwork.
- Ask a question that reveals thinking, not only recall. 'Why is 2/6 not the sum of 1/2 and 1/4?' tells you more than 'What is 1/2 + 1/4?'
- Plan the decision before the check: 'If more than 20 of 30 miss this, I will re-teach it for 5 minutes tomorrow.'
Keep a balance
- If every task is graded, pupils learn to work for marks and hide what they do not understand.
- In an 8-lesson unit, plan several short, ungraded checks and one summative task at the end.
- Tell pupils which is which. 'Today's quick check is not for the journal; it is for me to help you.'
Formative and summative at a glance
Formative
During learning
- Changes what happens next
- Low stakes, often ungraded
- Short: 1 to 5 minutes
- Used by teacher and pupil
Summative
End of a unit or term
- Reports what was achieved
- Higher stakes, usually graded
- Longer: a lesson or more
- Used by school and family
Three timings, three questions
Think of assessment in three moments. Before a unit, a diagnostic check asks: what do pupils already know, and what do they wrongly believe? During the unit, formative checks ask: who is with me, and who is not yet? At the end, a summative task asks: what has each pupil achieved?
Each moment needs a different tool. Five oral questions at the start of a unit on rivers cost five minutes and may save two lessons of re-teaching. A thumbs check at the half-way point costs one minute. A written test at the end costs a whole lesson, so it should be planned as carefully as any teaching.
Low stakes give honest evidence
When every answer is graded, pupils learn to hide what they do not understand, because a visible mistake costs them a mark or embarrassment in front of the class. Formative evidence is honest only when mistakes are safe.
You can build that safety with small habits: tell pupils which checks are not for the journal, praise a useful wrong answer ('this is exactly the mistake many people make'), and use whole-class signals so that no single child is exposed. Ungraded does not mean unimportant. It means the result is used to help rather than to rank.
Examples from the classroom
A thumbs check in Samarkand
Scene. Dilnoza reads a short story to her Grade 4 class of 28 and asks pupils to show thumbs up, sideways or down for 'I can retell it'. Nine thumbs are sideways. Instead of moving on, she asks two confident pupils to retell the first half, then asks the class to try again in pairs for three minutes. The whole check and fix takes five minutes.
Insight. A one-minute formative check gave a decision (retell in pairs) that a graded test would have delivered too late.
The test that was not just a score
Scene. Jasur marks a Grade 8 history test in Bukhara and lists the three most-missed questions: 19 of 30 pupils confused two dates. He returns the papers without a mark first, spends ten minutes re-teaching those dates with a timeline on the board, and lets pupils correct two questions. Only then does he record the marks.
Insight. The same summative test became formative because the results were used to teach again before they were recorded.
Exit slips in Fergana
Scene. At the end of a Grade 6 science lesson on evaporation, Aziz asks each of 32 pupils to write one sentence: 'Water goes into the air when ...'. In four minutes after school he sorts the slips into three piles: got it (18), nearly (10), lost (4). Tomorrow he starts with a 5-minute demonstration for the ten and sits near the four.
Insight. Sorting evidence into a few piles turns a class of different answers into simple next steps.
Common pitfalls
- Grading every small check, so pupils stop showing what they do not understand.
- Collecting evidence and doing nothing with it, so the check was only paperwork.
- Treating formative as 'ungraded homework' rather than as a way of changing teaching.
- Using one big end-of-unit test as the only evidence of learning.
Sort the Assessment Moments
- Work in groups of three with the ten assessment cards from your Activity Kit.
- Group sort (10 min): put each card into FORMATIVE, SUMMATIVE or EITHER (depends on how the result is used).
- For each EITHER card (10 min), write the decision the result could inform and the one thing the teacher must do to make it formative.
- Share (5 min): each group presents one disagreement and how it settled it. Then pick one summative moment from your own term and change its use.
Your facilitator will guide you through this activity in the session.
Questions to discuss
- Which cards did your group argue about, and what settled the argument?
- What was the one thing a teacher had to do to make a summative moment formative?
- Which decision from today will you make in your next lesson?
Reflect
- Which assessment in my teaching has no decision attached?
- What one quick check could I add to tomorrow's lesson?
- How do my pupils feel about checks: as help, or as threat?
Try it tomorrow
- Add one 2-minute exit question to tomorrow's lesson and sort the answers into three piles.
- Decide before the check what you will do if more than a third of the class get it wrong.
- Tell pupils which of this week's tasks are for learning and which are for the journal.
Further reading and links
Name the decision first. The same task is formative if you use it to change teaching, and summative if you only record it.