formative vs summative assessment in education

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Assessment | Career and Technical Education (CTE) | Curriculum Development | Classroom Planning

Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

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March 19th, 2024 | 8 min. read

Brad Hummel

Coming from a family of educators, Brad knows both the joys and challenges of teaching well. Through his own teaching background, he’s experienced both firsthand. As a writer for iCEV, Brad’s goal is to help teachers empower their students by listening to educators’ concerns and creating content that answers their most pressing questions about career and technical education.

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Whether you’re an administrator, supervisor, or teacher, you’ve heard of formative assessments and summative assessments . They're both essential parts of any curriculum map . But what do these terms actually mean?

In a nutshell, formative assessments are quizzes and tests that evaluate how someone is learning material throughout a course .

Summative assessments are quizzes and tests that evaluate how much someone has learned throughout a course .

In the classroom, that means formative assessments take place during a course, while summative assessments are the final evaluations at the course’s end. 

That's the simple answer, but there's actually a lot more that makes formative and summative assessments different. To fully understand formative vs. summative assessments, you'll need to understand the details of these two important forms of assessment.

In this article, we'll take a closer look at formative and summative quizzing and assessing. When you've finished reading, you'll understand how to better test student knowledge in your classroom.

What Are Formative Assessments?

Formative assessments are evaluations of someone’s learning progress in a classroom.

Common formative assessments include:

• Presentations
• Group activities

Formative assessments work great when they’re used on a regular basis. That regularity could be based on a calendar (every Monday, every Thursday, etc.) or your lesson plans (every unit).

They’re also more flexible than summative assessments. You don’t always have to use pencil and paper to get a feel for your students’ progress. Instead, you can use in-class games, group presentations, and hands-on activities to evaluate student progress.

Ultimately, the formative assessments you use are up to you. After all, no one knows your classes better than you. So if you’d prefer to get an overview of how well your students are learning, you can use a group-style assessment like a game. If you want to know where each student struggles, you can use an individual assessment like a quiz.

This flexibility is perfect for keeping students engaged in your class. It lets you stick to a syllabus while mixing up the exact task each student has to perform. That way, you don’t fall into a predictable routine of teach-test-teach-test. Instead, you have a varied routine of teach-game-quiz-teach-presentation-project or another interesting format.

By the time your course ends, you’ll have a full understanding of how students are learning as you teach a subject. Then, you can keep all of your grades to look for patterns among different class sections.

Is there an area where students seem to do worse than others? Could you adjust a lesson and shoot for better results?

Naturally, you’ll never get a class that’s straight A’s from top to bottom. But you can still design your classroom assessments to work for as many students as possible!

Top 3 Formative Assessment Examples

Formative assessments are excellent opportunities to let your students flex their creative muscles.

Even if a student isn’t much of a writer or artist, they can still have a little fun with these assessments.

1. Make an Advertisement

Have your students create an advertisement for a concept they just learned. Use visuals and text to really sell an idea.

This makes students apply what they’ve learned into a creative exercise, which helps with long-term retention.

2. Idea Comparisons

Instruct students to lay out the main ideas of a new concept they learned. Then, have them compare that concept to another to see where they agree and disagree.

In addition to helping students remember these concepts, this exercise makes them apply previous knowledge to a new format so they can remember it better in the future.

3. Misconceptions

After you introduce a concept to students, introduce a popular misconception about it. Have students discuss why the misconception is false and where it may have started.

This exercise makes students think critically about what they’ve just learned while showing them how to debunk misinformation.  

How Do You Track Formative Assessments?

You can track formative assessments in one of three ways: by grade, by feel, and with student data .

Let's take a closer look at using each of these methods to monitor student progress.

Track by Grade

First, you can track them by grade . This gives you a specific, concentrated view of how a student (or group of students) learns. However, graded assessments are sources of stress for many students. So if you want to make a unit fun or loose, graded assessments may not work well for you. 

Track by Feel

Second, you can track them by feel . This is more based on your teacher instinct, allowing you to pick which students need additional support based on your observation. On the downside, you can’t “show” this information to your administrators. If you have certain standards to meet throughout a marking period, you won’t be able to prove you’ve fulfilled those standards without grades.

Track with Student Data

Finally, you can track formative assessments with  student data . This is non-graded information that may reflect how your students are learning, such as questions they've frequently answered incorrectly or subject areas where they've had trouble. After all, not everything has to be a grade!

When you have a comprehensive data management system in place, tracking with student data can be the most effective way to measure student progress.

With all of that said and done, let’s next consider summative assessments.

What Are Summative Assessments?

Summative assessments are evaluations of what someone has learned throughout a course. 

Common summative assessments include:

• Final exams
• End-of-class projects

Summative assessments almost always take place at the end of a course unless a teacher decides to break a course into more manageable chunks. They’re often cumulative, and they’re used to evaluate a student’s long-term information retention.

In summative assessments like final exams , you can include questions from the first week or two of a course to ensure students retained introductory information. In other assessments like papers, your students can pull from a full marking period of learning to apply to a topic.

Either way, your students have to do some serious reflecting and critical thinking to bring together the information from an entire course.

This is a great way to ensure students retain essential information from one course to another. So if you teach introductory courses, summative assessments are perfect to set students up for success in their next classes.

That’s important because a student’s success in your classroom is just one step for them. When you prepare them for the next step, you make it easier for them to succeed in the future as well.

In that way, summative assessments serve two purposes:

First , they evaluate what someone learned while they’ve been in your class.

Second , they evaluate how prepared someone is to go to the next academic level.

Combined with the rest of a student’s performance in class, summative quizzing and assessments are excellent ways to gauge progress while ensuring long-term information retention.

Top 3 Summative Assessment Examples

Summative assessments are traditionally more structured and standardized than formative assessments.

Still, you have a few options to shake things up that go beyond a pen-and-paper test.

1. In-depth reports

Instruct students to choose a topic that resonated with them in class and report in-depth on it. This is a great opportunity for students to take an idea and run with it under your supervision.

These reports often showcase a student’s interest, and you’ll be able to evaluate a student’s engagement level in the class by how they approach the report.

The goal is a passionate, intelligent, and comprehensive examination of a concept that matters to a student. 

2. Cumulative, individual projects

Have your students pick a project to complete. This project should somehow reflect what they’ve learned throughout the course.

Projects are great for any practical application class from health science to physics. Creating a cross-section of the human heart, designing a diet, or creating a protective egg-drop vessel are all fun ways students can show off their knowledge of a topic.

3. Personal evaluation papers

Require students to apply principles from your class to their personal lives. These papers are excellent fits for psychology, nutrition, finance, business, and other theory-based classes.

In a nutshell, personal evaluations let students look at themselves through a different lens while exploring the nuances of the principles they learned in class.  Plus, it lets students do something everyone loves — talk about themselves!

Now that you have a few ideas on summative assessments, how can you track their success?

How Do You Track Summative Assessments?

While everyone has their own ideas on this topic, grades are the best way to evaluate someone’s success with a summative assessment.

How you grade is ultimately up to you. Presentations are great ways to grade someone based on a number of factors, including soft skills like public speaking. Written exams or project-based assessments are ideal to see a student’s full-scope understand of your class after a marking period.

Whatever you choose, stick to a consistent grading scale so you can identify your own strengths and weaknesses in the classroom as students complete your course. 

What’s More Important: Formative or Summative Assessments?

Many new teachers have this question — are formative or summative assessments more important?

In a perfect world, they’re equally important. Formative assessments let students show that they’re learning, and summative assessments let them show what they’ve learned.

But American public education values summative assessments over formative assessments. Standardized tests — like the SATs — are great examples of high-value summative assessments.

It’s rare to find the same emphasis on formative quizzing and assessments. That’s because formative assessments act like milestones while summative assessments show the bottom line.

We encourage teachers to look at these assessments as two sides of the same coin. Formative and summative assessments work together flawlessly when implemented properly.

With all of that in mind, you only have one question left to answer. How are you going to add these assessments to your curriculum ?

Use Formative and Summative Assessments and Meet Your Challenges

As a teacher, you’ll likely need to employ both summative and formative assessments in your curriculum. An effective balance of these assessments will help you understand your students’ needs while meeting your standards.

However, CTE teachers face challenges in the classroom each day that sometimes get in the way of connecting with students and preparing them for these assessments.

If you want to feel less overwhelmed and spend more time helping your students succeed, download your free guide . You’ll learn about five of the most significant challenges teachers face and how you can overcome them.

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Formative And Summative Assessment: The Differences Explained For Teachers

Sophie Bessemer

Formative assessment and summative assessment monitor progress and drive student learning. Both types of assessment help teachers adapt teaching and learning to identify strengths and areas for improvement for individuals or whole cohorts.

In this article, we explore the differences between formative and summative assessment. We’ll discuss when, why and how to get the best out of each to keep progressing students’ learning.

Let’s start with a brief overview, followed by a detailed examination.

Formative vs summative assessments – what is the difference?

In a nutshell, here’s how we define the difference between formative assessment and summative assessment: Formative assessment is low stakes and designed to identify students’ current understanding; it informs teachers about the next teaching steps. Summative assessment is higher stakes and used at the end of a unit to evaluate student learning against a standard or benchmark.

There are several nuances around this definition which we explore below.

The Ultimate Guide to Maths Assessments

This guide offers a breakdown of primary and secondary maths assessments, with proven strategies and free resources to use in the classroom.

What is formative assessment?

Formative assessment is the use of day-to-day assessments to gauge and explore students’ understanding of a topic. These assessments determine student needs, which teachers use to form learning outcomes in order to prioritise student achievement and success.

Formative assessments are one of the teaching strategies used to help inform the learning ‘in the moment’. Formative assessment is continuous, informal and should have a central and pivotal role in every maths classroom. It can be thought of as an assessment for   learning . 

If used correctly, it will have a high impact on current learning and help you guide your instruction and teaching by giving ongoing feedback on students’ progress.

Low-stakes assessments help pupils develop skills and confidence before attempting high-stakes summative assessments. It also makes room for self-assessment and provides a baseline for measuring progress.

• Formative assessment
• The 6 best assessment for learning strategies

What is summative assessment?

Summative assessment takes place after pupils’ have completed a block of work, whether that be on a term or modular basis. They are a more formal way to sum up pupil progress and are often compared against a standard benchmark.

They are best thought of as assessments  of  learning.

There are different types of summative evaluations that we carry out ‘after the event’, often periodic (rather than continuous), and they are often measured against a set standard.

Summative assessment can be thought of as helping to validate and ‘check’ formative assessment – it is a periodic measure of how learners are, overall, progressing in their mathematics learning.

Read more: Summative assessment

A breakdown of the differences between formative and summative assessments

Formative and summative assessments differ in several key ways:

• Purpose : the purpose of formative assessments is to improve learning, while the purpose of summative assessments is to gain a measure of attainment (e.g. a final grade).  
• Frequency : formative assessments occur regularly throughout lessons, while summative assessments occur at the end of a teaching-learning cycle or class.
• Type of assessment : formative assessments are typically low-stakes, while summative assessments are high-stakes.
• Outcome : following formative assessments, teachers provide feedback to improve learning. Summative assessments result in a final grade or score used as a measure of attainment.

Importantly, the form of the assessment does not determine whether it is formative or summative. Instead, it is determined by how the assessment is used.

For example, ‘test-style questions’ can serve as formative assessments, like exit tickets at the end of a lesson, or summative assessments, such as end-of-unit tests.

In all subjects, especially maths, we use a combination of both assessment strategies. However, formative assessment, due to its constant nature, constitutes the bulk of our assessment activities.

Formative vs summative assessment comparison

This venn diagram clearly shows the differences and similarities between the two assessment types.

Formative assessment: what you need to know

Formative assessment is an intrinsic part of both teaching and pupil progression. This form of assessment does not rely upon tests and results, but rather the ability to adapt to classroom blockers as they arise. 

It should indicate what constitutes good work and why. It also allows teachers to identify areas in students’ knowledge that need improvement and to act upon them.

Good formative feedback helps teachers and pupils plan the next stages of progression and set future learning goals together.

How to use formative assessments in your lessons

During a lesson, all adults in the classroom should be on a ‘constant assessment mission’ through interactions with pupils. 

Teachers should be moving around the room, interacting with each child, and assessing their progress towards the learning objective.

In the moment assessment can take many forms:

• You could ask your pupils a series of carefully selected diagnostic questions to assess where to pitch the next stages of the lesson and determine which pupils would benefit from more support.
• Perhaps you are using a hinge question in a class discussion to assess where you need to pitch the independent, group, or whole class work, or which children require further support.
• You could use exit tickets to assess children’s understanding at the end of a lesson.

Every in-the-moment assessment should have a purpose. Use the information obtained to understand students’ strengths, weaknesses, and learning processes, and adapt future lesson plans

Ask yourself:

• If your assessment shows that children are secure, how will you deepen their learning?
• If your assessment shows that children have some misconceptions, how will you address these?

Formative assessment examples and ideas

There are many types of formative assessments to support your maths class and track pupil progression.

Common examples of formative assessment include:

• Group activities
• Diagnostic tests or pre-assessments
• Multiple-choice questions
• Class projects
• Presentations

Read more: Formative assessment examples

Practical tips for implementing formative assessment

1. ensure every formative assessment routine has a purpose.

If you are going to do the ‘maths lesson classic’ and ask children to show you an answer on a mini-whiteboard , make sure you are looking at the answers from all children. 

Use these to inform the next step in your lesson and the learning for each child.

I have observed many lessons where teachers used the mini-whiteboard routine but did not review the responses and continued with their planned lesson.

Remember – it is not the activity or thing that you do that represents effective assessment, but the subsequent decision-making and what you do with the information you gather from it.

It is through effective, in-lesson, formative evaluation that you ensure that each child is supported and challenged, and that every child is  learning  rather than constantly  rehearsing  what they already know.

Read more: Adaptive teaching

2. Address the learning gaps and don’t leave potholes

I often use a ‘pothole’ analogy with the schools I work with. Imagine a local council was filling in potholes but that their road maintenance vehicles were creating new holes in the road.

They wouldn’t be doing a very good job at improving the overall quality of the road surface would they?

Similarly, schools often carry out various interventions to fill gaps from previous years but inadvertently create new gaps.

Use in-the-moment and end-of-lesson assessments to address emerging gaps. At the end of the maths lesson, check all children are secure with the objective and intervene if necessary.

If you do not address the gaps now, who is and when?

Read more: Same day interventions

3. Understand diagnostic assessment and how it works

A multiple choice diagnostic assessment is probably the most effective type of assessment. This is when you set up your formative assessment in a deliberate way to diagnose the precise learning gaps and misconceptions that each of your students may have.

Each carefully selected incorrect option for your multiple choice answers can highlight a particular maths misconception . This design ensures that students can answer correctly only if they clearly understand the topic, free from any misconceptions.

This format benefits student understanding and is efficient for teachers, allowing for quick marking and immediate feedback.

Questions can be answered quickly, typically within ten seconds, allowing frequent use without taking up valuable learning time. Regular use of diagnostic assessment tools encourages students to reflect on their learning and identify areas needing further study.

Download a free diagnostic maths test for primary or secondary maths to get you started.

Summative assessment: what you need to know

Summative assessment examples and ideas.

Summative assessment demonstrates pupils’ success in meeting specific goals. It quantifies student performance and achievement, providing a numerical basis for the next step.

Examples of summative assessment in primary school include:

• End-of-term or end-of-year tests
• Teachers graded reports home to parents
• Practice papers
• End-of-term projects
• Optional KS1 SATs
• Compulsory KS2 SATs

Examples of summative assessment in secondary school include:

• External examinations and qualifications, such as GCSEs and A-Levels
• Externally-marked assessments, such as CATs
• Tests at the end of a unit of work to measure attainment of taught content
• Departmental assessments occurring at the end of term or year
• Tests which feed into progress monitoring (e.g. at reporting points)

Practical tips for implementing summative assessment

However, whilst the principles of summative assessment are simple, there are 4 key points you need to consider before implementing it.

1. Understand the difference between your assessment framework and your assessment system

Despite the power of ‘in the moment’ formative assessment, schools do need a way to track the attainment and progress of children throughout the school. 

Schools must consider the assessment framework or assessment rubric used for evaluation. This decision is often made at the school or trust level.

At this point, you need to be clear about the difference between your assessment system and the framework you are using. 

Often, schools mention using various websites and/or apps, such as Classroom Monitor, Target Tracker, or School Insights for assessment. These assessment systems allow you to record and track children’s progress against the chosen assessment framework.

They are tools for recording, not conducting, assessments

These assessment systems are great teaching resources as they allow you to select (and often create) your own framework to assess your children – these frameworks are vitally important.

2. Consider the balance of objectives and targets in your assessment framework

When choosing or creating an assessment framework, balance the objectives and target areas of mathematics within the framework.

For example, a common occurrence is that schools assess against each objective on the national curriculum. However, this is problematic and often creates unwelcome ‘surprises’ when comparing teacher assessments against standardised summative assessments. 

An example of this is SATs tests – I have been asked to work with many schools where their assessment against the whole national curriculum does not match pupil performance on previous SATs papers.

The disparity arises because the national curriculum is not weighted the same as the KS2 end of key stage assessment (SATs).

Read more: Why your SATs interventions should not start in Year 6

KS2 test frameworks show a clear weighting towards number based objectives.

Number, calculations and proportionality make up between 75-85% of a child’s final result.

Yet, most year groups have around a 50/50 split between ‘number’ objectives (number, calculations and proportionality) and ‘non-number’ objectives (shape, space, measures and statistics).

This essentially means that a child could be legitimately marked as ‘secure’ or ‘working at aged-related expectations’ against the whole national curriculum, on the basis of their strength in shape, space, measures and statistics. However, they wouldn’t be classed as ‘secure’ or ‘working at age-related expectations’ in a standardised test.

It is therefore important that whatever framework you use is balanced, and represents the weighting of objectives in the test frameworks.

There are many ways in which you can do this, including: 

• In-built weighting functions in assessment systems.
• Assess against key objectives only, which overall, have the balance of number vs non-number objectives.
• Group objectives together, creating the overall numbers vs non-number balance. 
• Use a commercially available assessment framework which has the weighting work done for you.

TOP 20 MATHS REVISION TOPICS FOR KS2 SATS

Every year Third Space Learning updates their detailed detailed analysis of past papers to determine the topics that have appeared most often on the Standardised Assessment Tests (SATs) at the end of year 6 as well as the numbers of marks allocated to these topics.

This list informs the order of lessons we teach on our one to one SATs revision programme which every year supports thousands of children to achieve their best outcomes in SATs.

READ MORE: Top 20 topics for your year 6 SATs revision

At secondary school, the GCSE exam board frameworks mirror the weighting at primary school towards number .

With many more strands to test the marks in final exams are more fairly divided across algebra, geometry and ratio and proportion. Only probability and statistics tend to be regularly responsible for fewer marks across the 3 GCSE maths papers .

For a more detailed read on marks and topics across content domains and strands at GCSE, read this regularly updated question and topic level analysis of all edexcel GCSE maths papers .

GCSE MATHS 2025: STAY UP TO DATE Join our email list to stay up to date with the latest news, revision lists and resources for GCSE maths 2025. We’re analysing each paper during the course of the 2025 GCSEs in order to identify the key topic areas to focus on for your revision. GCSE dates 2025 GCSE results 2025 (when published) GCSE results 2024 Analysis of GCSE Maths Paper 1 (2024) Analysis of GCSE Maths Paper 2 (2024) Analysis of GCSE Maths Paper 3 (2024) Summary of ALL GCSE Maths Papers (2024)

3. Train your teachers how to use the assessment framework

Once your school decides on an assessment framework, next comes the question of how it is used. 

These frameworks can be used both in a purely summative or formative way that leads to, over time, an accurate summative assessment. 

Traditionally, schools use these frameworks to assess each child at set points, such as termly or midterm exams.

However, your framework is set up to ensure that all teachers fully understand it and can accurately and consistently apply it.

How to use the frameworks formatively as well as summatively

These frameworks can be used formatively with teachers recording progress towards objectives as they are taught.

An example of this is recording and amending judgements each week as a result of the ‘ongoing’ assessment. This leads to an ever-changing snapshot of each child’s performance, which can be really powerful.

This can be used to inform interventions and subsequent teaching, and help to identify common misconceptions, giving the assessment framework used by your school both a summative and formative use. 

It is reassuring that many schools favour teacher assessment to provide this ‘data’. 

Teacher assessment is incredibly powerful and gives teachers the professional autonomy they deserve. 

4. Regular standardised tests can be used with your assessment framework

Many schools will also use some form of testing alongside their assessment frameworks.

This can help validate teacher assessment judgements, and ensure there are no ‘nasty’ surprises when it comes to Year 6.

However, testing is only as good as the quality of the tests used As we know, the development of SATs tests takes 3 years . These tests are standardised and use a ‘scaled score’.

Make sure that the tests your schools rely on also have the same degree of work that has gone into their development.

They should be standardised – so you know how children across the country perform, and be based on a clear test development framework, and have been trialled and refined in schools. 

Some popular tests developed this way include PUMA (by Hodder/Rising Stars Assessment), NFER tests and GL Assessments.

In a test by Rising Stars using PUMA assessment data, pupils who received one to one tuition from Third Space Learning made double the expected progress over 14 weeks.

Regardless of which tests are used, schools and teachers will understand that they provide a snapshot of the performance on the day the test was taken. Children, like adults, have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days, and these tests should be seen as a supplement to good quality teacher assessment, not a replacement.

Formative vs summative assessments – pros and cons

Both formative and summative assessments play important roles in the classroom and schools. Find the right balance between the two approaches for your class’s learning needs.

Constant formative assessment can prove difficult if not implemented properly, but consistent assessment of pupils’ strengths and weaknesses can prove invaluable in helping them to progress.

Summative assessments often don’t show the whole picture of a pupil’s progression. But that are a fantastic method for collecting a data-driven overview of pupil progression.

The goal of this article was to summarise the difference between formative and summative assessment, and the conclusion is that both approaches have their flaws, but they can also provide valuable insight into how a class is getting on throughout the school year. All that is left is to use assessments of both kinds to inform your teaching!

• The Myth of Expected Progress in Primary Schools
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• Pupil Progress: Measuring The Impact Of The Affective Domain Across 1,750 Schools
• KS1 Assessment Frameworks Maths

DO YOU HAVE STUDENTS WHO NEED MORE SUPPORT IN MATHS?

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Since 2013 these personalised one to one lessons have helped over 169,000 primary and secondary students become more confident, able mathematicians.

Learn about the diagnostic assessment or request a personalised quote for your school to speak to us about your school’s needs and how we can help.

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