Formative and Summative Assessments in the Online and Blended Environment

This week in my Leading Edge Certification course, we learned about assessment in the online and blended environment.  I was reminded of a blog post by Will Richardson in which he states, We define an “education” by what we assess, which in turn defines the value (or lack of value) of this thing we call “school.”  One of the complaints many critics have about high stakes testing is that teachers tend to offer instruction mainly on what will be on the state exam, which in turn narrows the curriculum to what can be tested on a multiple choice test.  Using Web 2.0 tools as part of online and blended courses offers us the opportunity to assess a broader set of knowledge and skills which in turn helps us to value a broader range of knowledge and skills.


We first looked at formative assessment, those assessments that provide quick feedback to both the teacher and student on the student's progress towards learning objectives.  One important consideration in creating formative assessments for an online or blended course is that the student get timely feedback and that the teacher do something with the results (as suggested in this blog post by Harry Tuttle).  Formative assessments are often automated in an LMS so that the student can get instant feedback.  Teachers in blended courses can also use systems such as Google forms to generate immediate responses using add on tools like Flubaroo.  All of these assessments are best for testing the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.


Teachers can also use threaded discussions or products developed in Web 2.0 tools for formative assessment, but the teacher must consider how he or she will assess the results.  We learned about a lot of resources for developing rubrics for this purpose.  This page by Kathy Schrock is my favorite.  Formative assessments using these tools are better for the higher levels of Bloom's.


Teachers can also think in new ways about summative assessments.  For a final exam, the teacher can enter many more questions than needed into a LMS and have the LMS generate tests with randomly selected questions.  For more complex assessments, students can upload essays or projects to a "digital dropbox".  One consideration I see for teachers in dealing with this kind of summative assessment is the need to have good tools for retrieving, viewing, and annotating final projects.  Also, having students create complex performance assessments as a summative assessment requires a lot of thought in creating the assessment tool.  It was easy to think of an idea for a summative assessment for the class project, but much more difficult to think about how it would be graded fairly. If a teacher is using performance assessment, I feel that the formative assessments need to be carefully monitored to ensure the student is ready for the performance assessment before the student puts time and effort into its development.


I addition the above considerations, as I implement assessment in online and blended courses, I feel I need to remain thoughtful that assessments reflect what I value in the course.  My assessments should reflect both the content and the thinking skills that are most important to the domain I am teaching.  It's easy for me to get excited about all the online tools available, but I still need to consider the "best fit" for my objectives and not just the "WOW factor" of the tool.