Summative Assessment

Summative assessment refers to assessments which seek to obtain comprehensive information about student competence in a domain (e.g., science) for an evaluation of student learning. Teachers use summative assessment at the end of a unit or school year to gather evidence about students’ mastery of the content covered throughout the unit or school year as a basis for grading. These classroom-based summative assessments are closely related with the learning aims of the instructional unit and thus the curriculum. However, summative assessments are also used by other agents within the education system, such as policy makers. Policy makers, for example, use summative assessments for monitoring the efficiency of parts of the educational system (e.g., specific curricula) or the education system as a whole (e.g., in comparison to other countries’ education systems).