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Formative use of summative tests

High stake summative assessment, such as GCSE's and A-levels, are an essential part of schooling. Businesses and universities both need a recognised method of being able to judge if one candidate is better than another. Teachers are often accused of just teaching to the test and therefore formative methods need to co-exist with summative ones. This leads to the question of how best we can use these tests of learning to assist pupils for learning? Firstly mock tests can be very useful for peer-assessment techniques outlined above. While it may not be worth going through an entire question paper, pupils can work in small groups discussing key questions and producing model answers. The teacher can also use the results to feed back on common errors and focus learning to overcome misconceptions. Another useful tool is for pupils to use the results of their tests to fill out a table using the traffic light system to mark their performance against each of the topics tested. This is very useful for the pupils to use as a strategy for revision or for working out their own targets for improvement. The last aspect that was seen to improve pupils performance in formal testing was the practice of pupils creating their own questions for each other to answer. By making pupils think up the question they have to show an understanding of the topic as well as what needs to be assessed.

In order for teachers to implement these changes into the way they work it is necessary for them to reflect and review their own practice. The suggestion is that teachers should start with one aspect of formative assessment and work on building that into their lessons. Once this has been successfully implemented they can then move on to working on a different aspect. In order to succeed in making formative changes to their lessons teachers need to have a through understanding of their own subject knowledge. This will allow them to break topics down into the essential building blocks pupils will need to successfully learn.

As governments put greater pressure on schools to use pupil data to improve educational performance there is a growing market for commercial packages that will collect and analyse data such that the school can use it in a formative way. An 18 month study (Militello et al, 2010) in North America looked at the implementation of commercial software packages in three different districts. Since all the schools in a single district were using the same software they studied one school in each of the districts. The study showed that in only one of the three schools was the data clearly fed back to teachers so they could use it to change their classroom behaviour. They concluded that there is a danger of too much time being spent testing pupils in order to gather the data as well as issues of the data not being available to teachers both quickly and in a meaningful manner. Schools need to focus on why they are putting a system into place and how the information is going to be used to improve classroom practice.