Formative and Summative Assessments: Purposes, Characteristics, and Examples

Aligned Assessments (Formative and Summative)
Name
Institution Affiliation
Date
Aligned Assessments (Formative and Summative)
Purpose and Characteristics of Assessments
The purpose of formative assessment is to monitor the students' learning progress, after which the teacher provides ongoing feedbacks and uses them to improve the teaching strategies. The assessment identifies the weaknesses and strengths necessary for enhancing self-regulatory skills (MasteryConnect, 2016). The assessment is required since it allows the students to learn less haphazardly and provides information to different faculties regarding significant support for learners' struggles. The critical characteristics of formative assessments include learning progression, identification of gaps, feedback provision, and student involvement.
Summative assessment has a significant purpose of evaluating the student learning; it is done by comparing the student performance to benchmark or standard at the end of the instructional unit (MasteryConnect, 2016). Therefore, summative assessment evaluates the students' different capabilities and shows what they learned in the instruction period. The critical characteristics of summative assessments include validity, reliability, and authenticity. It is authentic since it focuses on real-life applications. Furthermore, summative assessment should cover all the areas taught in class. Therefore, both formative and summative assessment determines the student's capacity and educational learning.
Examples of Formative and Summative Assessments
The first example of formative assessments includes providing a short paper on a given subject matter in class. The process is a formative assessment since it does not cover the whole instructional unit but an understanding of a given learning section. The second example is providing lesson exit tickets (MasteryConnect, 2016). It will enable the teacher to identify the understanding of the students on a specific lesson. The two examples are short-term and allow the teacher to determine the progress of the learners instantly.
On the other hand, the first example of summative assessment is midterm or end-term exams. It is an example of summative assessment since it focuses on a long-term evaluation covering different concepts during the instruction period (MasteryConnect, 2016). The second example of summative assessment is the end-of-unit test. It is a summative assessment since it describes the whole ideas that the student learned throughout the unit. Therefore, summative is more comprehensive since it covers a broader scope of learning.
Advantages and Disadvantages of the Assessments and Technology
The essential advantage of using technology with formative assessment is that technology tools in student data collection allow the teachers to easily promote flexibili...