Rethinking the Summative Label: Is It Good for Learning?

This post is born from multiple really good conversations I've had with people on various platforms the last couple days (yes, it's possible to have meaningful, productive conversations on social media) that have truly highlighted how passionately I care about assessment (surprise, surprise), but more specifically, how much I care about the distinction between formative and summative assessment. 

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Teacher prep programs don't spend enough time meaningfully talking about assessment. I had one graduate course solely dedicated to assessment, and then it was sort of sprinkled around some of the other ones. The running theme for all of it was essentially that you should use multiple formative assessments that lead to a summative assessment. It sounded so neat and tidy. We talked about how the formative assessments were the data to guide instruction to help students be successful on the summative assessment. 

It all made perfect sense, and ideally would work well for kids and learning. I used this approach for years, and initially, the more I got into reading and researching assessment practices, the more I relied on the summative assessments to determine student grades, which is partially why it's so hard for me to say that I absolutely loathe summative assessments and how they are used in the classroom. 

I mean it. I can't stand them anymore, and to be honest, I am wary of any pedagogy that clings to the distinction between formative and summative as if it were a life or death situation.

Here's why. 

With the ways that it's traditionally used in the classroom, formative assessment provides data that benefits the student by guiding their learning, pointing them to where they need to go next. Summative assessment provides data that benefits the system by ranking and sorting students as a terminus of learning. 

Can we start with a very simple statement: learning is never done. Simply the act of naming it a "summative" assessment asserts that we have concluded something. 

If that's the case, that the summative assessment concludes something, then we have two ways of interpreting this. 

1) Summative is defined as the end of a learning process.

2) Summative is defined as the end of a set period of time. 

If we claim that our summative assessments adhere to the first definition, that they are the summation of a learning process, then all kids should be taking them at different times. It would be ludicrous to claim that all kids learn the same thing at the same rate, and thus should take their summative assessment at the same time if we're claiming that the assessment occurs when the learning has been completed. I think it's fair to say that this is not the definition of "summative" used in most contexts. 

If we instead use the second definition, that summative describes the end of a set period of time, this one creates even more issues for me, at least in how it plays out most often in classrooms. Picture for me that you teach a biology class, and at the end of two weeks students receive a summative assessment on cell structures. That's a totally normal thing to do. But, how does it play out?

Typically, the students take the test and then the class moves onto the next content. If this is the case, then the only function of the summative assessment was to rank and sort students. There's no way around that. That was the sole function of the assessment. It wasn't for learning; it was for ranking. 

I am sure a lot of people right now are saying, "But the goal is to use that data to find what the student still needs to learn and then provide support or differentiation or..." So, now we're talking about formative assessment. By nature of the definition, if you continue the learning after the assessment, the assessment was not summative in nature, but rather, it was formative. It gave data that was used to further the learning.

I know this sounds like semantics here, but it's not. Why? Because too often the label of "summative" in the classroom is used as an excuse to wash our hands of a students who's struggling and move on knowing full well that they didn't learn the material. 

I say this as someone who did it almost exclusively for far too long and still finds myself guilty of it on occasion now. 

This is why I think we need to question this idea of summative assessment, at least in the ways in which it functions in our current education system. It's driven by this idea that the only way anything can work is if we move 30 kids along at the same pace and accept that there will be casualties along the way. 

I can't let that sit with me. I can't let "summative" continue to be a label that we use to justify the fact that a kid is fine with a 60% because the summative had to happen at a certain time when the learning needed to happen at a different time. 

I hate seeing systems drive things when the system isn't good for kids. 

So what do we do?

I understand that most of us are constrained by limitations put on us by districts with pacing guides and curriculum agreements. I understand that often the lack of training and support around the meaningful implementation of technology means we don't understand what alternatives are available. I understand that so often when we try new things, we fall flat on our faces and after a while we're just too tired of getting up, so we just keep walking down the same path. 

But there are better ways. 

For starters, stop thinking of summative assessment as an activity, and start thinking about it as a process that you engage in with students. I now use the term "summative analysis" because the process that I use is one where I look through all available evidence, sit down with the student, and we analyze the data and the story behind it to come up with a summative mark that represents the student's current level of understanding. 

I realized that I railed against standardized testing for not providing a complete view of the student, for devaluing the work they did over the entire year, and yet in my own classroom I was providing singular assessments that were doing just that. So now I don't. Now, I am working to continually refine a process that emphasizes to students that every single time they show me something, it matters. I'm refining a process where assessment is a collaborative process where students have a say in their learning and the grade that gets reported out, something that they can have control over as long as they can prove to me that they know it. I'm working to constantly refine assessment to be something that matters, not to the school system – to the student. 

That's what matters. 

I know some of you right now are thinking big picture and going to argue that the year still ends at some point, and there's no way around that, and there is validity in what you say, but there's not finality. There are schools exploring mastery transcripts and portfolios where at the end of the year, the student takes a true record of their learning onto the next class, and they pick up right where they left off. There are already schools engaged in year-round school where, instead of waiting for summer to do packet-based summer school, the multiple-week breaks between each term is time for students to continue to learn and demonstrate mastery of their content. There are schools I've talked to in Idaho where the teachers rolls up with their cohort of students to keep cohesion between grade levels so the learning is like it never stopped. 

But, here's what I know: tomorrow you don't have control over that. You aren't reforming the school system over night, though I hope we never stop fighting to make it better. But tomorrow – tomorrow you have the opportunity to help students see assessment as a valuable process that helps them feel powerful as a learner, not powerless. 

It starts with questions how we view the finality of our summative assessment process. 

Question it, try something new, and prove to your kids that you are always willing to go out on a limb because you care about giving them the best experience you can. 

Educators are incredible, but we are so because we never stop trying to get better. 

You've got this.