Should Common Assessments Look Like Summative Assessments?

I was recently asked two questions from a talented teacher who is engaged with her school and team in developing common assessments. Following are the questions and my response. 

Questions: “Can you share some thoughts about aligning the formative assessments to the quarterly assessment? Should formative questions look like those to be seen on the quarterly assessment? Should questions on the quarterly assessment be new compared to those previously seen by students?”

Response: Let me give a little background. First, it’s important to recognize that thoughtful schools and teams have a balanced approach when it comes to assessments. Meaning, they have and use common summative assessments, common formative assessments and formative assessments.  There are distinctly different purposes for each. 

Common Summative Assessments
The quarterly assessments your team has developed are generally more summative in nature. They are an event used to tell how well the strategies used by teachers worked. They tell how well students have learned, and often used to assign a grade. But because the information from summative assessments is collected so infrequently, they are not as useful in helping to improve learning. The information is too late. What they are useful for is establishing what is essential to be learned within the time period, and through the process of development, have given clear direction to teacher teams that the standards alone don’t.  We often talk about the power of formative assessment, but don’t underestimate the power of summative assessments! They play a huge role in developing a guaranteed and viable curriculum! (Your team needs to celebrate what you’ve accomplished so far!)

Formative Assessments
Formative assessments don’t have to be common and can essentially be any task that helps the teacher gather information about student progress. If the teacher is deliberate and thoughtful, any in-class activity, task or assignment, can yield tons of information and allow the teacher to provide on-demand intervention or plan new whole group direct instruction. This type of assessing doesn’t have to be an event. “Good teachers” are constantly gathering information through assignments, activities, or by just walking around that informs their feedback and instruction. “Master teachers” track that information over time about each individual student’s progress so they can be strategic about improving each child’s learning. 

Common Formative Assessments
The purposes of the common formative assessment is three fold:

1.Uncover the most promising practices or strategies for teaching a specific skill with the students we serve
2.Gather information that helps to diagnose, respond to and improve student learning
3.Make pacing, materials or assessment adjustments

It’s only through sharing our progress or results that we best accomplish these purposes.  

Now, back to your original question, “Should formative questions look like those to be seen on the quarterly assessment? Or, should questions on the quarterly assessments be new compared to those previously seen by the students?” 
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The answer is, yes to both!  We have to remember our purposes. The purpose for creating summative assessments was to establish what needs to be learned. In your best judgement the tasks you’ve created on the summative assessment are representative of that expectation. In other words, if kids can do well with the tasks on the summative assessment, we think they’ve actually learned the skill. That said, if we have done a decent job of formatively gathering information about their progress along the way, we should already know how kids will perform when they take the summative test, right? 

Regardless, it should never be about kids passing the test. It should be about each kid learning the skill(s).  So, again, yes, the common formative tasks could look like the summative assessment tasks, and that might be a good place to start, because of the hard work done to ensure those are at the appropriate rigor levels. But, they probably shouldn’t only look like the summative tasks. The reason is, because if kids have really learned the skill, they should be able to perform tasks in lots of formats and contexts, familiar and not so familiar. The process is about learning the skill, not about passing tests! The questions you’re looking to answer through your formative and common formative assessment practices are:

• Do our kids really know how to do this?
• Why is each kid that is struggling not learning yet?
• What are we going to do to address the specific deficits of each kid?

When you’re assessing, either formatively as an individual teacher, or as a team through common formative assessments, you’re trying to tease out actionable information that will help unlock individual student’s learning. To that end, I would say that the more formatively you’re assessing, the more I would suggest novelty and increased rigor in those tasks. In other words, while in the safety of the low stakes environment of your classroom is where you would want to help kids try to tackle the skill in unfamiliar contexts and rigor levels. Your careful observation over time while they are trying these unfamiliar tasks will tell you, better than the summative assessment, whether they are getting it. And, if you’re strategic about how you collect that information individually and as a team, you will know what the root of each child’s deficits are and therefore be able to help them really learn the skill… and oh yeah, pass the test.   

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