No more ‘Summative Purpose’?

Reading material for my course I found an article arguing for change in terminology or better for shift in terminology in assessment. It all became more clear now, however, I do not know, whether to start using new terminology in my essay and further writing, or keep the old one, standard and used by many authors before.

What is it all about? Paul E. Newton in Clarifying the purposes of educational assessment argues, that words Assessment, Summative assessment, Formative assessment or construction like summative and formative purposes are not defined clearly and causes confusion. There is traditional way in looking at formative assessment as opposite to summative assessment. However Mr.. Newton says, that those two terms are from different categories, therefore they cannot stand in opposite.

1. claim – assessment is a judgment. Can be done with different purposes in mind and different methods can be used. (Stop using formative, summative etc.?)

2. claim – there is no formative judgment (Formative assessment), but there is an assessment with formative purpose or many other purposes, depending on how we use information gained from the judgment.

3. claim - There is no summative purpose. Assessment can be summative, descriptive, norm-referenced, criterion referenced… depending what date and in what form we are collecting.

So there should be distinction between purpose of the assessment based on the use we put the data in (formative, diagnostic, system monitoring)  and the judgment which can be based on the continuum between summative (using quantitative terms) and descriptive (using qualitative terms).

In that case, according to Mr. Newton we can avoid confusion in using summative data for formative purposes or any other purposes, or using descriptive data for that sake too.

Traditionally the main difference between summative and formative was in timing and use. Formative being used during the learning process and summative at the end. And Formative was about using data to enhance learning, to help student etc. Summative was more about collecting data about the achievement. But apparently in new literature (and more importantly in classroom) this timing distinction is no more valid. Summative data can be used for formative purposes not only at the end, as we collect data on prediction and can use them to intervene, if somebody is underachieving. This means we use summative data during the process of learning…