Summative Assessment
Summative Assessment
Review of Literature
Summative Assessment
Assessment is a term that covers any activity in which evidence of learning is collected in
a planned and systematic way, and is used to make a judgment about learning. Assessment is
summative in function if the purpose is to summarise the learning that had taken place in order to
grade, certificate or record progress. When summative assessment is used for making decisions
that affect the status or future of students, teachers or schools, the demand for reliability of
measures often means that tests are used in order closely to control the nature of the information
and the conditions in which it is collected (Harlen & Crick, 2002). Summative assessment is
defined by Dunn and Mulvenon (2009) as the evaluation of assessment based data for the
purposes of assessing academic progress at the end of specified time period (i.e., a unit of
material or an entire school year) for the purposes of establishing a students academic standing
Related Studies
Black, Harrison, Hodgen, Marshall and Serret (2010) conducted a project that combined
both intervention and research elements which set out to explore and develop teachers
understanding and practices in their summative assessments that are used on a regular basis
within schools for guiding the progress of pupils and for internal accountability. The intervention
aimed both to explore how teachers might improve those practices in the light of their re
examination of their validity, and to engage them in moderation exercises within and between
schools to audit examples of students work and to discuss their appraisals of these examples.
This paper reports findings, arising from this work, of the research that aimed to study how
teachers understand validity, and how they formulate their classroom assessment practices in the
light of that understanding. The paper also considers how that understanding might be challenged
and developed. It was found that teachers attention to validity issues had been undermined by
Examining the reliability and validity of the administered summative assessment would
test questions and structures. The review on the teachers feedback on summative test
construction will serve as a gauge to the development of planning programs in the scope of the
present study.
collaborative research projects whose common goal was to explore the potential role of
project, upper primary teachers were encouraged to compare their practices through a form of
social moderation, without prior instructor input or theoretical preparation. In the second project,
alignment, under the guidance of an instructor. The findings support the potentially constructive
controversies, and their contribution to the construction of the subjects under discussion.
The role of teachers and capacity in the development of summative assessments are
considered to be crucial since their practices will greatly contribute to the test construction of
summative assessment.
A study of Harlen (2007) on the systematic review of research on the reliability and
validity of teachers assessment used for summative purposes also addressed the question on
what conditions affect the reliability and validity of teachers summative assessment. The initial
search for studies meeting the explicit inclusion criteria of relevance found 431potentially
relevant studies. This number was gradually reduced, through the systematic review procedures,
to 30 studies, which specifically addressed the review questions. These studies were subject to
of any differences of interpretation. This procedure was also used to judge the weight of
evidence provided for the review by each study so that greater emphasis could be given to
findings from the most relevant and methodologically sound research. The findings of the review
by no means constitute a ringing endorsement of teachers assessment; there was evidence of low
reliability and bias in teachers judgements made in certain circumstances. However, this has to
be considered against the low validity and lower than generally assumed reliability of external
tests. The findings also point to ways of overcoming the deficiencies of teachers assessment and
lead to implications for assessment policy, practice and research, which are proposed in the final
Wynne Harlen
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02671520500193744
Journal
Pages 228-249 | Received 06 Aug 2016, Accepted 05 Feb 2017, Published online: 28 Feb
2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2017.1293001
Journal