Formative vs summative assessment: differences and examples

Teachers, trainers and assessment teams use both kinds every week, often without naming them. Naming them helps, because the two serve different purposes and should be designed differently. A test built to certify competence makes a poor practice quiz, and a quick check of understanding makes a poor final exam. This article explains the difference, shows examples from classrooms, training and the workplace, summarises what the research says, and gives practical advice for designing each.

Where the terms come from

Michael Scriven introduced "formative" and "summative" in 1967 to describe two roles of evaluating educational programmes: improving a programme while it is being developed, and judging it once it is finished. Benjamin Bloom and colleagues applied the distinction to student learning in 1971. The idea stuck because it captures a real choice every assessor faces: is this assessment meant to help learning, or to certify it?

The differences at a glance

Examples in different settings

• School and university. Formative: a five-question quiz at the start of a lesson, a "hinge" question halfway through to decide whether to move on, comments on a first draft. Summative: the end-of-term exam, the final project mark.
• Training providers. Formative: practice tests between modules, a mock exam two weeks before the real one with a review of every wrong answer. Summative: the end-of-course test that decides who receives the certificate of completion.
• Workplace and HR. Formative: knowledge checks inside an onboarding course that send people back to the part they missed. Summative: the compliance test that must be passed every year, or a skills test used for promotion.
• Certification bodies. The certification exam itself is summative. Formative assessment appears as official practice tests and sample questions that help candidates prepare.

Two other terms often appear next to these. Diagnostic assessment happens before teaching, to find out what learners already know; it is formative in spirit. Interim or benchmark assessments are given a few times a year to track progress; they can serve either purpose, depending on whether anyone changes their teaching because of them.

Does formative assessment work?

The modern interest in formative assessment comes largely from Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam's 1998 review of around 250 studies, which concluded that strengthening formative assessment raises achievement, with effect sizes often quoted between 0.4 and 0.7. Later work has been more cautious. A 2011 meta-analysis by Neal Kingston and Brooke Nash found a smaller average effect, around 0.2, and pointed out that many studies were weak. The fair summary is that formative assessment helps, by a meaningful but not miraculous amount, and that the effect depends on how it is done.

Two findings explain most of the difference:

• Feedback has to be used. John Hattie and Helen Timperley's review describes good feedback as answering three questions: where am I going, how am I going, and where to next? A score alone answers none of them well.
• Retrieving information strengthens memory. In Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke's experiments, students who took practice tests remembered more a week later than students who spent the same time restudying. Low-stakes quizzes are therefore not only a measurement; they are part of learning.

Designing good formative assessment

Dylan Wiliam and Marnie Thompson describe five strategies that sum up the practice:

1. Clarify and share what learners should achieve and what success looks like.
2. Design tasks and questions that produce evidence of understanding.
3. Give feedback that moves learners forward.
4. Get learners to help each other.
5. Get learners to take ownership of their own learning.

In practice, for quizzes and practice tests:

• Keep it short and frequent. Five questions every lesson tell you more than fifty at the end of the month.
• Write distractors that reveal misconceptions. If each wrong option corresponds to a typical mistake, the pattern of answers tells you what to reteach, not only how many got it right. The method is explained in item analysis.
• Show the correct answer and why. A short explanation for each question turns a practice test into a lesson.
• Keep the stakes low. In Ruth Butler's 1988 experiment, students who received comments improved more than students who received grades, and students who received both did no better than those with grades alone. If a practice test counts heavily towards the final mark, learners will treat it as summative, and copying becomes worthwhile.
• Act on the results. An assessment is only formative if something changes because of it.

Designing good summative assessment

• Start from a blueprint that matches the syllabus, so the test samples what the grade claims to certify. See question banks for how a blueprint turns into a test.
• Use enough questions for the scores to be reliable, especially near the pass mark. The numbers are explained in reliability vs validity.
• Keep conditions consistent and secure: the same time limit and instructions for everyone, supervision, and different versions for candidates sitting side by side.
• Check the statistics before publishing results. A wrong answer key on a final exam affects every candidate; an item analysis catches it.
• Decide what candidates see afterwards. For a high-stakes exam, showing every correct answer can leak the question bank; a score per section is often enough.

Frequently asked questions

Is a quiz formative or summative?

It depends on how the results are used. A quiz that leads the teacher to reteach a topic, or the learner to revise it, is formative. A quiz whose score simply goes into the final grade is summative, even if it is short.

Can summative results be used formatively?

Yes. An end-of-term exam can show which topics a whole class found difficult, and that can shape next year's teaching. This is sometimes called the formative use of summative tests.

Should formative assessment be graded?

Generally not, or only lightly. Grades shift attention from learning to the score and encourage copying. Record results to guide teaching, and give comments or explanations rather than marks.

Are practice tests formative assessment?

Yes, when learners get their results quickly and use them, ideally with the correct answers and explanations. Practice tests also improve memory directly, through the testing effect.

Sources

• Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1), 7–74.
• Bloom, B. S., Hastings, J. T. and Madaus, G. F. (1971). Handbook on Formative and Summative Evaluation of Student Learning. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Butler, R. (1988). Enhancing and undermining intrinsic motivation: the effects of task-involving and ego-involving evaluation on interest and performance. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 58(1), 1–14.
• Hattie, J. and Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112.
• Kingston, N. and Nash, B. (2011). Formative assessment: a meta-analysis and a call for research. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 30(4), 28–37.
• Roediger, H. L. and Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
• Scriven, M. (1967). The methodology of evaluation. In R. W. Tyler, R. M. Gagné and M. Scriven (Eds.), Perspectives of Curriculum Evaluation. Chicago: Rand McNally.
• Wiliam, D. and Thompson, M. (2008). Integrating assessment with learning: what will it take to make it work? In C. A. Dwyer (Ed.), The Future of Assessment: Shaping Teaching and Learning. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.