The Role of Assessment in Teaching

Top

Why Should We assess Students' Learning?
This question has several answers. We will use this section to address four of the most common reasons for assessment: to provide summaries of learning, to provide information on learning progress, to diagnose specific strengths and weaknesses in an individual's learning, and to motivate further learning.
Summative Evaluation
The first, and probably most obvious, reason for assessment is to provide to all interested parties a clear, meaningful, and useful summary or accounting of how well a student has met the teacher's objectives. When testing is done for the purpose of assigning a letter or numerical grade, it is often called summative evaluation since its primary purpose is to sum up how well a student has performed over time and at a variety of tasks.
Formative Evaluation
A second reason for assessing students is to monitor their progress. The main things that teachers want to know from time to time is whether students are keeping up with the pace of instruction and are understanding all of the material that has been covered so far. For students whose pace of learning is either slower or faster than average or whose understanding of certain ideas is faulty, you can introduce supplementary instruction (a workbook or a computer-based tutorial program), remedial instruction (which may also be computer based), or in-class ability grouping (recall that we discussed the benefits of this arrangement in Chapter 6). Because the purpose of such assessment is to facilitate or form learning and not to assign a grade, it is usually called formative evaluation.
Diagnosis
A third reason follows from the second. If you discover a student who is having difficulty keeping up with the rest of the class, you will probably want to know why in order to determine the most appropriate course of action. This purpose may lead you to construct an assessment (or to look for one that has already been made up) that will provide you with specific diagnostic information.