Formative assessments help teachers and students monitor progress toward proficiency goals. The purpose is to provide feedback and inform changes to increase understanding. Formative assessments provide continuous feedback to see where students are and how to better support learning. Summative assessments evaluate the level of proficiency reached, usually at the end of a unit. In challenge-based learning, most assessment criteria must be assessed throughout the process, and results should inform changes to teaching or student work. Formative assessment is crucial to set students up for success in challenge-based learning.

1. Module 5
Facilitating Challenge Case
Exploration
Section 3
Lecture 2: Formative and Summative
Assessment
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2. Formative Assessments
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Formative assessments
help teachers and
students monitor
progress toward
proficiency. The purpose
of formative assessment
is to provide feedback to
students and to inform
changes in instruction to
increase understanding.

3. Formative Assessments
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Formative assessments are a form of continuous
improvement, a way to “take the pulse” of an
individual or group of students to figure out where
they are, what they need, and how to better
support deep learning.

4. Summative Assessments
Summative assessments are intended to
evaluate – to determine what benchmark or level
of proficiency a student has reached at a given
point in
time, usually at the
end of a unit of
instruction.
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5. Why They Matter in
Challenged-based
Learning
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6. Challenge-based learning is
designed to develop student
competencies that cannot always be
demonstrated in a final product or
final presentation. Most criteria
included on the student assessment
rubric must be assessed over the
course of the entire process - during
the beginning, middle, and end of the
Challenge Case Exploration – and
the results should inform changes in
what either the teacher or student is
doing.
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Student Competencies

7. Formative assessment is crucial to set students up for
successful outcomes. For example, if a student doesn’t
have enough information about an employer’s workplace
system early in the process, he or she will need to develop
additional questions or make new observations, or run the
risk of misunderstanding the nature of the problem, and
therefore designing an unappealing or ineffective solution.
Without formative assessment, students may get all the
way to the end of the experience without having the
resources they need to be successful.
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Successful Outcomes

8. Formative assessment is also important because it
helps model a design thinking mindset, and get
students used to the notion of frequent progress
checks to improve quality. It teaches students that
testing and checking early and often is a way to
improve outcomes down the road.
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Model Design Thinking

9. Helpful Readings
To refresh your own understanding (or that of your team), check
out the following resources to learn more about formative and
summative assessment.
– “Formative and Summative Assessments.” Yale Center for Teaching
and Learning, Yale University (2018).
– “Summative and Formative Assessment.” Center for Innovative
Teaching and Learning, Indiana University Bloomington (2018).
– “A More Complete Picture of Student Learning” by Andrew Miller.
Edutopia (December 2017).
If your team is already comfortable with formative and
summative assessment but is looking to improve the quality and
effectiveness of the feedback provided, this resource provides
some useful classroom strategies.
– “Maximizing Your Feedback’s Impact” by Marianne Stenger.
Edutopia (March 2017).
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