In his article Deforming The Formative, Arthur Chiaravalli argues that our “…testing mentality infects and distorts each of the three phases of formative assessment” and this got me thinking about something I have been struggling with for a long time: summative assessments. I just haven’t said out loud yet that there really isn’t any need for summative assessments. Summative assessments do not have a place in the learning process if they are used to derive a grade or “finish” the learning time. All assessments can be formative. What changes is the learning target.

The learning cycle

Teachers identify a learning target and provide learners with an opportunity to learn and practice this target. Formative assessment is happening all of the time as teachers react to student interaction with the skill by giving actionable feedback and direct instruction needed. Eventually, learners reach a point of competence with the skill and a new target is presented. There is no need to name a “summative assessment” to engage in this cycle. It is the normal cycle of learning that we all engage in with many different types of skills we need to learn all the time. 

What’s worth learning?

As I engage in more and more ideas around proficiency-based learning, it seems less and less necessary to think about “summative” experiences as we have traditionally. Final tests, projects, essays, and presentations, when designed around effective proficiency become a cycle of revision based on feedback, new learning, and reflection. What does make a difference,  though is the proficiency or competency we choose to focus on. This thinking doesn’t work if what’s being assessed is a discrete procedure or factual information. 

Proficiency skills are broader

In working with a language teacher last semester, we struggled with what she should be assessing. She teaches language using something called comprehensible input which, when she described it to me, seemed like teaching language how babies learn their native languages. She presents learners with the language and they work to understand it as they read, write, and speak it. She does all of these skills every time she teaches a class. She doesn’t teach verb conjugations. There is no memorization of vocabulary. By the time we were finished thinking about the skills she wanted to assess, it came down to reading, writing, and speaking in another language. It was that simple. She also expressed frustration at having to “give a summative” as that is how our grading and reporting system is set up because she knows how they are doing and so do they. They are constantly engaging in these proficiencies in class every day and there is no need for anything else. The next piece was about figuring out what the scale or learning progression in each of those areas looks like for someone learning a new language. 

Thinking about time differently

There are a few considerations with time. First of all, most of us still teach in a school with schedules, class periods, maybe bells. Learning different skills takes different amounts of time. Not all skills will have the same time progression. And, learners will interact with any time progression we come up at different rates. Some will take longer and some will move faster. This is not new. So, we need to design progressions with this in mind and also around our specific situation. In our school, there are quarters that mark a sort of checkpoint and semesters that represent and endpoint. The Spanish teacher will need to create a learning scale for proficiency around reading Spanish that can be reasonably attained by a quarter and semester. It would not be reasonable to expect a 1st-year Spanish student to pick up on the nuances of the Spanish language or be able to use colloquial Spanish or identify a dialect or accent. It may be reasonable to expect that they could understand basic storylines when reading simple text in Spanish; that they could verbally describe basic information about themselves. And, as we always have, provide a way for those who need more time to get it and provide those who move faster ways to be challenged. 

If we are thoughtful about the proficiency or skill being assessed, there is no need for a summative assessment. The tool learners need is a clear learning scale with many learning experiences that allow them to interact with all levels of the proficiency and opportunities to reflect on the gap between their performance and the learning scale expectations. See how aliens learn and how that can help us or check out a lesson planning template that gets away from summative assessments.