From the course: Learning to Teach Online

Summative and formative assessments

From the course: Learning to Teach Online

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Summative and formative assessments

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- [Presenter] Delivering quality feedback to the learners is a critical element of the learning process, and most learning management systems provide you with many tools to do so. First, let's take a look at the two main types of assessment and feedback. That is formative and summative. During the learning process, it's good to provide learners with assessments and feedback that gauge how well they're understanding the material and if there are any misconceptions that may need to be resolved. This is known as formative feedback or formative assessments because they help form the learner's understanding along the way. Examples of this include a short knowledge check or quiz to see if concepts are being understood; a one-to-one conversation, even if done through messaging. Essentially, it's a check-in to see how well the learner understands the content and whether they have any questions. Another example is surveys to see how confident learners are about the material. Rough drafts on final papers or projects, which provide a check-in to see if the learner is on the right track, as well as a ton more. Now, there are many different ways to check in with the learners to see how well they're understanding something along the way. Activities like Venn diagrams, think-pair-share, and others work well for this. Now, the second type is summative assessments. These are typically assessments at the end of a course, unit, or module testing to see if the learner has reached a level of mastery. For example, you need 80% to pass a course in order to get credit. That would be a summative assessment. The best example of this is a test or final exam, a final presentation, or maybe even a final project. This feedback is important because it lets the learner know how successful they were at mastering that material and what confidence with regards to the material that they can proceed with. In my opinion, formative assessments and formative feedback is the most important part of the learning process because it helps form the learner's understanding of the content. Without this, learners would've no way of knowing how well they're comprehending the material as they're learning it. I've been a student in a college level course in which the only times we were assessed was by a mid-year and final exam, meaning that we only had summative assessments. These may have gauged how well we understood the material at the end of the grading periods, but there was no formative feedback given along the way to give us a sense of how we were doing. So when designing online courses, consider using both summative and formative assessments.

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