Question
What are the two main types of assessment?
Answer
There are two main types of assessment, summative assessment, and formative assessment.
Summative Assessment
Oftentimes, summative assessments can be considered high-stakes. Summative assessments are used to gauge children's learning against a standard or a benchmark. They are often given at the end of the year and are sometimes used to make important educational decisions about children. Summative assessments are a snapshot of students' understanding which is useful for summarizing student learning. What helps me remember the difference between the two types is that summative is like a summary. Summative is the big picture or the grand summary of a child's learning.
Summative assessments aren't used a lot in early childhood programs because they're not really considered developmentally appropriate as a form of assessment for very young children. One example that you might see or use in your program is a Kindergarten Readiness Assessment or a developmental skills assessment that enables the child to move to the next classroom. I've heard of some programs doing assessments like that, where a child has to have a certain score on this assessment in order to move up to the next preschool room or the four or five room, or whatever it was for that particular program.
There's a little bit of debate within our field about whether it is developmentally appropriate or not to test children to move them up to that next level. In my experience, there have been several times where I felt that a child was ready to move up to the next class even though age-wise or chronologically he wasn't the right age to move. I'm sure we've all had those children where we're in the three-year-old class and the child's mentally five, but chronologically he's three. Then there have been other times where the child was chronologically ready to move up at age five, but developmentally I really felt like he should have been in the other room for a little bit longer.
There are all kinds of implications for using an assessment of that type for that reason. Not to say that that's wrong to do. It's just there's a little bit of debate in our profession about using those types of assessments.
Formative Assessments
That takes us to the second type of assessment which is formative assessments. These are considered low-stakes. So summative are high-stake and formative are low-stake. They're ongoing and they tend to be based on teachers' intentional observations of children which are typically during specific learning experiences and/or during everyday interactions or classroom involvement. These assessments are most useful for planning learning experiences, activities, and environments.
These are the everyday interactions that we talked about, where assessment naturally emerges from the work that you're already doing. Those would be considered more of the formative assessment. Again, these assessments are used to determine activities for the lesson plan after asking questions such as
- What kind of things should I change out in my centers?
- What kind of items in the science center are the kids just throwing?
- What kind of things in the science center are they actually sitting down and investigating and trying to see what they can figure out about it or are they really actually curious about?
When I was a preschool teacher, I had many four to five-year-old children in my classroom because at the time, the ratio for our state was one to 15. I had 30 children in my classroom and I had to really be on top of what my children were interested in and what they had figured out or had gotten over the excitement of. When you have that many children in the classroom, you have to keep them engaged, active, and busy. Formative assessments were extremely helpful for me in that way.
Formative assessments are most appropriate for use with young children. Remember, summative assessments are not necessarily appropriate for age five years and under, but formative assessments are definitely appropriate as they're often more authentic, more real, and more holistic. They show a picture of the whole child as well so they can be more useful. Because young children's learning can be so varied and sometimes erratic, using multiple sources of assessment information is ideal. That goes back to what we were just talking about where children develop in such a wide range, with a variety of contexts and situations.
There's such a wide range of development when it comes to young children, that even though you might have a classroom full of three-year-olds, developmentally they're going to be on a spectrum. That's because development in learning is varied and can be erratic. The term erratic may be a little bit shocking at first, but young children's learning can be erratic. For example, if you work with infants, one day you send them home and they can't sit up or roll over and are just laying there looking at you. Then they come back on Monday and they're rolling and moving and grooving and doing all kinds of stuff. If you work with toddlers, one day you send them home and they barely say two or three words, the next week they come back and you can't get all the words down that they're speaking. In this situation, erratic means sometimes very sudden, but sometimes it's drawn out. It depends on the child.
Formative assessments can be formal, where you're actually making time to sit down and take notes during a specific time or a specific center based on a specific child. They can also be informal such as when you're out on the playground and a child is sitting under the tree with a book and you just go over and you sit down and say, "Hey, can I read with you?" You notice, wow, this child knows a lot of words in this book and you make a note of that. That would be more of an informal type of assessment that you've done.
Formative assessments can be initial or ongoing. The initial formative assessment is usually done to find out as much as we can about the child, usually at the beginning of the year or as a child enters a program. It usually involves observing, studying existing information, and reviewing home background info.
In the program that I supervised, when we had a new child join our program, we had a sheet that the parents would fill out that asked all kinds of information like, "What's your child's favorite stuffed animal? How does your child go to sleep at night? What's the bedtime routine? What's your child's favorite food? What's your child's favorite movie?" It was all background information about the child so that we could get to know them. That helped us begin those connections that are so important in early childhood. That home background information would be a part of that first initial formative assessment.
The other type of formative assessment is an ongoing formative assessment. This typically provides more in-depth information, often because it takes more time. An ongoing formative assessment isn’t a quick form that you’re through with once. It’s an ongoing thing you will look at every week, month, three months, or however it is set up in your program.
Here are some examples of published formative assessment tools often used in early childhood programs.
- The Work Sampling System (WSS) www.worksamplingonline.com
- Teaching Strategies GOLD www.teachingstrategies.com
- HighScope COR (Child Observation Record) www.onlinecor.net
- The Creative Curriculum Developmental Continuum www.teachingstrategies.com
Sometimes a state or funding sources will mandate that certain early childhood programs use a specific assessment tool. Sometimes your program itself mandates that. I've had the experience of working with all of these tools at one time or another in my career. All of them have definite benefits to using them and many of them are pretty easy to complete. As you know, in early childhood time is not a luxury that we have a lot of. It's always nice to have a tool that's easy to use so that when you find five minutes to sit down and work on something or do an assessment, then it's easy to figure out.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Purposes and Benefits of Assessment, presented by Natasha Crosby Kile, MS.
