Formative and Summative assessments serve very different purposes and should be designed with this in mind. They can be thought of as being synonymous with the phrases “Assessment for learning” and “Assessment of learning” respectively.

Formative Assessment is developmental and should assist the student and their teaching staff to assess the student’s strengths, weaknesses and progress. It should facilitate staff support to help the student to learn more effectively, develop and overcome their weaknesses; it is a powerful tool in developing independent learners. Formative assessment tasks should be “low stakes”, such as submitting a tabulated list of things that the students understand the module assessment criteria to require them to do, or producing a research proposal to allow teaching staff to see if the students’ research ambitions are realistic. The best formative assessment is continuous rather than ‘one-off’; for example, a weekly submission of one or two sentences to summarise the main point of that week’s lecture or topic.

Remember that formative assessment can be either formal or informal and that the outcomes of formative assessments can and should lead to revision of teaching activities and materials as well as interventions to help students to progress with existing activities and materials (Crooks, 2001; Napper, 2013).

There is significant research which shows that effective feedback leads to significantly improved attainment (e.g. Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, 2006) but also that formulaic and bland feedback is worse than no feedback at all (e.g. Darwent and Musgrove, 2023). This applies to both formative and summative feedback but if formative assessment is to serve its intended purpose the feedback which follows from it is particularly important.

There are many sources of tried and tested formative assessment ideas (e.g. sally-brown.net), but a small selection of examples is given here:

• Blackboard (online) quizzes or progress checks
• One-minute writing(very similar to the two sentences to articulate the main point of a lecture, mentioned above)
• Exit Tickets – students are given a few (5 or less) questions on the session just before it ends and have to post their answers on their way out (can be done electronically too)
• Think-Pair-Share discussions
• Peer-reviewed research proposals or project plans
• Student Marking tasks (where students are given a variety of fake or anonymised pieces of work and have to assess them against the published module criteria – this is to gauge the students’ understanding of the criteria)

Some ‘keys to success’ when designing formative assessment tasks are:

• Formative assessment should always align accurately with module outcomes and module assessment criteria (Biggs and Tang, 2007). The connections between formative assessment and the outcomes being measured should always be clear to the students.
• Provide feed-forward rather than feedback after a formative assessment activity. The Stanford WISE model (Yeager et al, 2014) and the Stanford+ model (Darwent and Musgrove, 2023) illustrate how and why this is powerful for student development.
• If the formative assessment is “marked” against criteria, these should be the same criteria as the summative assessment will use, or a clearly defined sub-set of them.
• Have a variety of formative assessment tasks, if possible different in nature from the summative assessment, to keep students engaged and to reduce the chance of accidental self-plagiarism in the summative task.
• Formative assessment tasks should be ‘safe’ and make students feel confident about ‘taking risks’: they should be excellent facilitators of confidence building.
• Aim to use formative assessment tasks to help students develop, refine and extend their self-assessment skills (Boud, 2000).
• Keep in mind Sadler’s “three conditions” (Sadler, 1989)which enable students to benefit from formative assessment feedback: Students must know:
  • What good performance is
  • How their current performance compares to good performance
  • How to close any gap between current performance and good performance

Summative Assessment should assess the students’ learning in a specific task, module, or course. As its name implies, it comes at the end of a period or section of learning and it should assess the learning that has happened in that period against criteria which have been published, are clear and have previously been discussed to evaluate the students’ understanding of what is required to meet them. Summative assessment tasks are “high stakes” by their very nature and whilst typical examples still include essays, dissertations and theses, there are many more suitable assessment vehicles which are strongly encouraged in the interests of accessibility, equality of opportunity, fitness for purpose and student engagement.

Find out more:

Sheffield Hallam Guidance

Teaching Delivery (SETL): Formative assessment (website) guidance and Teaching Delivery (SETL): summative assessment support (website) guidance – can be used for supporting students completing both individual and group work.

Refer to Assessment Essentials: Setting (module level): assessment scheduling (webpage) – group work.

The Digital Learning Team Support (website) model provides each department with their own DLT contact. They provide a wide range of guidance on using technologies to support your course design and planning:

• Guides (website): provides an overview of the type of technologies available for assessment and feedback.

Help with Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL Help website): covers a number of guides on setting up Blackboard modules and assessment tasks and key aspects of the Threshold Standards (website).   

Get Support: 

Contact your local School/Institute learning, teaching and assessment lead for support and guidance on the approach your area is taking.

Academic Development and Inclusion can help support you with staff development on a range of teaching topics and how inclusion can be an integral part of your practice.

The Digital Learning Team can support you with using digital tools for teaching and learning.