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Educational Assessment: Purposes of assessment · Formative, Summative and Diagnostic Uses

Why we assess learners: formative, summative and diagnostic uses, norm and criterion references, selection and accountability, and how stakes change what a test measures.

Educational Assessment · 22 questions

Try 3 questions

1. The same quiz can be formative in one class and summative in another. What decides which it is?

  1. How its results are used
  2. How long students get to finish
  3. The format of its questions
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Answer: How its results are used

An assessment is formative when its information is used to adjust teaching and learning, and summative when it is used to judge or certify what was learned.

2. When Michael Scriven coined the terms formative and summative in 1967, what was he evaluating?

  1. Curricula and educational programs
  2. Individual students' IQ scores
  3. Teachers' classroom discipline
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Answer: Curricula and educational programs

Scriven introduced the distinction for evaluating curricula; Benjamin Bloom and colleagues soon applied it to the assessment of student learning.

3. In a classic analogy, a cook tastes the soup while it is still cooking. Which kind of assessment does this represent?

  1. Norm-referenced assessment
  2. Formative assessment
  3. Summative assessment
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Answer: Formative assessment

Robert Stake's analogy: when the cook tastes the soup, it is formative, because there is still time to adjust; when the guests taste it, it is summative.

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