Plan your assessment strategy

Formative assessment is ongoing throughout the semester, allows you to monitor students’ progress in learning and provide feedback so students can identify gaps between your expectations and their learning. By encouraging students to monitor their learning based on the feedback they receive, this kind of assessment gives students more agency around their learning and can help them better achieve the learning outcomes. Formative assessment usually has low stakes, which means it has little or no point value in a student’s grade. Focusing on improving student learning early on and throughout the semester can also help ensure that students are adequately prepared for summative assessments. It can be helpful to think of formative assessment as assessment for learning.

Examples include:

• An outline or annotated bibliography in advance of a paper 
• Discussion forum in Moodle 
• Informal feedback on projects
• Minute papers
• Reading responses
• Self-reflection questions or activities 
• Student response systems for assessing prior knowledge or understanding (e.g., pre-course surveys on Moodle, ungraded in-class polling or quizzes)
• Take home practice problems with provided answer keys 

Summative assessment takes place at designated times in the semester to measure competence and usually contributes with higher stakes to a student’s grade. In this type of assessment, students’ learning is measured at the end of a unit or course against a predetermined standard. It can be helpful to think of summative assessment as assessment of learning. 

Examples include:

• Alternatives to exams or term papers (e.g., multimedia projects, podcasts, two-stage exams, etc.) 
• Final projects or papers
• Midterm exams