Vignette 8: Decisions, Decisions

Mr. Brit completed his marking and was very proud of the growth he saw in his students throughout the year.  Mr. Brit used many formative strategies to assess his students and as he began to calculate the achievement grades for the year, he needed to decide what fairly represented his students' learning.  Formative and summative assessment each play a significant role in determining achievement.  Formative assessment allows students to take risks and make mistakes.  It provides evidence of a student's growth and provides "on-going feedback, coaching, motivation and encouragement."


Self Reflection
I feel there is both merit and value in using formative assessment as a guide to summative grading.  If formative assessment is used successfully throughout the unit, term, or year the summative assessment should be fairly accurate.  It is the goal of formative assessment to guide student learning.  If the students use the feedback given to them by their teacher during formative assessment wisely it should reflect constant growth.  As a teacher, I think I would use my discretion as to what I would use for grading.  If I encouraged my students to take risks when doing an assignment I would not want to discourage them by taking it in for marks.  For grading purposes, I would use a combination of both formative and summative scores.  I hope I am not wrong in saying that I think both are valuable resources to use when showing a student's true achievement.  I would be sure to showcase both the formative and summative testing to the parents as I way of showing growth throughout the year, much like a learning portfolio.  I think achievement comes from growth and without the formative assessment, growth could be discouraged or misguided.  Students learning from mistakes is a more valuable lesson than being discouraged by the lack of coaching, feedback or motivation.