Recommendation 9
Julie Neisler (chair), Andy Zieffler, Matt Beckman, Jennifer Ward, Kate Kozak
Use a variety of formative and summative assessments to improve teaching and learning.
Effective teachers use assessment for making instructional decisions, motivating students, providing them with feedback about their learning, and measuring performance. Classroom assessment can be typically categorized as formative assessment or summative assessment, depending on the instructor’s purpose for administering the assessment. Formative Assessment can be described as assessment to assist learning (e.g., primarily used for Feedback), while Summative Assessment is best described as assessment of learning (e.g., evaluation, part of a student’s grade). Because the goals or purposes of formative and summative assessment are markedly different, the assessment process (e.g., timeline for administration, feedback) needs to be viewed differently by both instructors and learners.
We’ve also summarized additional information on Additional Considerations for Assessment, including Assessment in the Age of Advancing Technology (e.g., AI).
Formative Assessment
The primary goal of formative assessment is to assist student learning by providing feedback intended to modify the learning or instructional process (Black and Wiliam 1998). In particular, it needs to be administered at points where it is critical for instructors and students to ensure that students are progressing as expected. Importantly, the type of [feedback provided on a formative assessment] needs to help students adjust their thinking or behavior to improve learning (Shute 2008), though students may need scaffolding when translating feedback to adjustments. Feedback can be provided in many different forms, “from verbal responses given in class, to thoughtful, written feedback on students’ work” (Ruiz-Primo et al. 2010), but needs to be non-evaluative (Harrison et al. 2014), timely (Fisher et al. 2025), and specific to the cognitive task being assessed.
In addition to the benefits to students, evidence from student responses on formative assessment can help instructors make student-informed decisions during the instructional process. Metaphorically, instruction and curriculum are the teacher’s planned roadmap for taking learners from where they currently are to where the instructor wants them to be. Formative assessment can then be viewed as a real-time Google Maps, offering real-time data to instructors about when it is necessary to deviate from the original plan to better equip students to make the cognitive destination. Additionally, well thought out formative assessments can provide instructors with task-specific feedback about their students’ understanding. For example, evidence from formative assessment might highlight that students are struggling with a particular part of hypothesis testing (e.g., always measuring p-values as one-sided) which helps target instructional intervention. Research has shown that using formative assessment data to modify instruction or providing students with individualized feedback significantly positively impacts student outcomes (Formica, Easley, and Spraker 2010; Huberth et al. 2015).
Instructors should use a variety of formative assessments (e.g., [thumbs up/thumbs down], [discussions at tables], clicker questions, [think-pair-shares], [taking votes], having [students argue ideas]). Not only does this help prepare students for the array of nonstandard problems they will encounter in the “real-world,” but it also helps provide students with a deeper and more robust understanding of the content. Additionally, employing different methods of formative assessment may improve students’ sense of belonging by allowing them to engage with the material in multiple ways.
Feedback
Feedback on formative and summative assessment is necessary for informing student learning. However, this brings up some concepts that need to be explored. These include but are not limited to
- How do we give feedback well
- How do we use feedback to improve student learning
Actionable feedback on formative assessment is an important part of teaching. It can be used to give your students direction of where their thinking is along a productive track and when they may need to change their thought process. It is also useful for the instructor to inform where their teaching has been effective and what they may need to find another approach. There has been some research in higher education on how this feedback is helpful. Following is an exploration of some of the research.
It is important to note that not all feedback is helpful, and some may be detrimental. “Effective feedback should indicate what the learning goals are; what progress is being made toward the goal; and what activities need to be undertaken to make better progress.” (Barana, Marchisio, and Sacchet 2021).
Another aspect of feedback is that it should be “sum up that effective formative feedback should be ‘timely, constructive, motivational, personal, manageable, and directly related to assessment criteria and learning outcomes’” (Fisher et al. 2025). If the feedback is not given in time for the students to use it for other formative assessment and for summative assessment, then the feedback is not useful. So when giving feedback, think about how the students will use it, assess the content and not the person, and make sure that it provides enough information for improvement but isn’t so long that the feedback you are giving is not lost in the wording.
Feedback is important in helping a student become a confident learner. Culturally responsive feedback has properties that provide tools for students to become confident learners (Ferlazzo 2025). These properties are:
- State your confidence in the student’s ability to master this concept, process or skills (“I know you are a very capable student.”)
- Point out explicitly what the student got right and where he went wrong. (Here is where things got off track…”)
- Name specific actions he needs to take (i.e., review the steps, learn the procedure , etc.) ( “How would you fix that? Here’s where I’d like you to go back and review,” or “When you get to this part, rethink this move here…”)
- Re-affirm your belief in the student’s capacity and effort to reach the target (i.e., “You got this…”)
The use of feedback on summative assessment in higher education needs more research. There is some research that shows that feedback on summative assessment is not very useful. In order for feedback to be useful according to Harrison et al. (2014), a learner
- needs to be receptive to receiving it. Secondly,
- must understand the message being given, so it must be such that it aligns with the learner’s frame of reference (Kluger and DeNisi 1996),
- needs to set concrete, meaningful and attainable goals, and then take steps to reach them (Harrison et al. 2014).
However, all feedback whether it is on formative or summative assessments should be actionable. This means that the student can learn from the feedback to learn the topics either for future assessments or just general knowledge. In conclusion, all feedback should be timely, direct, readable, and actionable. Every teacher wants a student to learn and feedback should be part of the learning environment.
Summative Assessment
The primary goal of summative assessments is to gather evidence for the purposes of making evaluative judgments about the student’s learning (Cizek, Andrade, and Bennett 2019), and, subsequently, their grades. Traditionally these take the form of homework, quizzes, and exams, although [many alternatives] have been proposed in the literature (e.g., projects, performance-based tasks). The key to labeling assessment as summative is not the form the assessment takes, but that it is used to compute a final grade.
Summative assessment should always be coherently integrated with curriculum and instruction. This means that content included on a summative assessment needs to align with the learning outcomes in a course and with content from formative assessments. Because instructors only assess a sample of the course content, assessment items should reflect content that is important, because students make value judgments about what is assessed and what isn’t (Biggs, Tang, and Kennedy 2022; Wiggins 1998)
It is also important to clearly communicate expectations and performance standards to students. Providing instructions and guidelines for responding in sufficient detail and answering questions that arise will help prevent confusion and furnish more accurate evidence about students’ learning. This also means making the content, skills, and knowledge students will be evaluated on transparent to them, including the criteria used to make these evaluations. Creating and, when possible, sharing rubrics for evaluation of students’ performance helps with this transparency and also ensures equity for all students.
Protip: The formative assessment process can be used to familiarize students with expectations for performance on summative assessments! (Dobson 2008)
Additional Considerations for Assessment
Successful implementation of formative and summative assessments requires instructors to consider many aspects of their teaching environment. Course characteristics and institutional constraints often influence the choice of and application of formative and summative assessments. This following list, although not exhaustive, highlights several factors that instructors might consider when planning their assessment portfolio.
Institutional policies. Consider what policies your institution or department has in place regarding assessment.
- Are face-to-face (or proctored) exams required?
- What technology are students allowed to use on assessments?
- Are students required to use lock-down browsers during assessments?
Class size. How many students will be assessed? Will feedback be given to each individual student or general feedback summarized for the class?
Course modality. Are students taking an in-person class, an online class, or a class that’s a hybrid of online and in-person? Will students primarily receive assessments on paper or using an online homework system?
Lectures with Labs. Some courses are taught in large lecture halls with multiple smaller “lab” sections scheduled during the week. Will assessments be consistent across all the sections of the lab and how is that coordinated?
Access to technology. How does access to technology in the classroom inform the assessments you give? Will students have clickers or personal devices in class so they can respond to in-class questions? Are there computers for every student or pair of students? What technology do students learn with, and is that technology to be used during the assessment?
Assessment in the Age of Advancing Technology (e.g., AI)
The release of ChatGPT and similar large language models surprised educators with their ability to simulate natural conversation and its potential impact on students’ assessment. While AI may have initially seemed like an existential crisis in education, it is part of a continuing trend of technological advancements (like the internet and calculators) that require educators to adapt.
Whether the relevant technology represents a once-in-a-generation leap or just the latest R package, the guiding principle for integration into the curriculum is unchanged: the learning objectives dictate the appropriate response. With respect to assessment, two questions that educators have always needed to consider are whether and how each new technology is used.
For example, in considering the first question, it is incumbent for instructors to convey to students appropriate and inappropriate use of technology specific to teaching, learning, and assessment. There are many ways this can happen, including inviting students to contribute to drafting a class policy in collaboration with the instructor. Relatedly, it can be useful to reflect on whether the technology is used as a ‘tool’ (more efficient return on invested effort of the student as they achieve some desired learning objective) or a ‘crutch’ (students rely on the technology too heavily which undermines their learning) as a litmus test for appropriate and inappropriate uses.
In answering the second question, instructors might consider how the use of the technology might enhance or broaden student learning. For example, an instructor might use AI to foreground students’ evaluative thinking and conceptual understanding, by providing students with a prompt relevant to a course learning objective and an authentic AI-generated response to material that they are then prompted to evaluate, critique, or improve. For example, students could ask an AI chatbot to respond to a prompt such as “what does the term ‘confidence’ mean when statisticians report a 95% confidence interval” or “what happens to the results of a t-test if there is an outlier in the data?” and then critique the response.
Lastly, educators should not expect to shoulder the responsibility to digest and integrate new technologies alone. Just as resources and guidance were available for educators in the advent of technology in years prior, there are already several resources available for dealing with artificial intelligence. Generative AI and the Future of Education (2023) and the Cardona et al. (2023) and other authorities published reports almost immediately after ChatGPT was introduced to the public. Many universities also have resources and guidance available.
Additional Resources
Examples
Assessments