Formative assessment: The purpose of formative assessment is to monitor student learning and provide continuous feedback that teachers can use to improve teaching and students can use to improve learning. More specifically, formative assessment:
Summative assessment: The purpose of summative assessment is to assess a student’s learning at the end of a teaching unit by comparing it with some standard or benchmark.
I personally prefer summative assessments because they are mostly text/exams, and the best way to test learners’ knowledge in my opinion is through examinations. Summative assessments are relatively fair to formative assessments because the answers are either right or wrong whereas formative assessments can be often controversial.
Hi, Zhiwen. Thank you for your suggestion that the summative evaluation is relatively fair compared to the formative evaluation because the answers are right or wrong, and the formative evaluation often causes controversy, which is very interesting. All subject examinations and assessments at the end of the semester or the end of the school year belong to this type of evaluation. The purpose of the summative evaluation is to test whether the students’ academic performance has finally reached the requirements of the teaching objectives of each subject. But I am curious, do you think that if this kind of assessment is adopted, will the students be highly stressed and not conducive to their mental health?