Summative assessments are the higher stakes opportunities that teachers use to evaluate student learning. It is important that these assessments, whether traditional exams or projects, are aligned with content and skill standards identified for the unit or course. Typically, summative assessments occur at the end of a unit for students to demonstrate their mastery however, some summative projects may span the entirety of a unit or semester.

Keep in mind that a summative assessment doesn't always have to be the end of the learning. In the Edutopia article entitled "A More Complete Picture of Student Learning", Andrew Miller discusses the importance of a photo album of evidence as opposed to just individual snapshots and the need for teachers to be flexible and responsive with formative and summative assessments.

Schoology has been committed to developing a more robust assessment feature for teachers to use with their students. At this point, teachers can create assessments, build questions and reference materials, assign to students, and share assessments with other teachers. Create and assign rubrics to specific questions to provide students with a more detailed breakdown of their score. The schoology assessment feature also has a more detailed math editor than the original test/quiz option. Grades from Schoology Assessments can be tracked directly to the PowerTeacher Pro gradebook.

This year, Schoology hopes to add a question bank feature, more friendly printable tests, and a variety of grading views for teachers.

Unfortunately, there is no lock-down browser option that works with our student Chromebooks.

Schoology Help Page Instruction for Assessments

As a district, we have purchased a license for the online testing feature in Mastery Manager. It is possible to upload existing PDF assessments to Mastery Manager and have students take the assessments on their Chromebooks using the Exam Login app (lock-down browser). However, it is also possible to use the Item Bank 2 feature to build, share, & assign questions directly in Mastery Manager. Teachers can create questions and reference materials in "My Content" then combine them into an assessment or share them with a workgroup. Reference materials can include text, images, audio clips and videos then related questions can be linked directly to those materials. Rubrics can also be created in Mastery Manager and linked to specific, reviewable questions. To take the assessment, students open the Exam Login app in the bottom left corner of their Chromebooks and enter the code generate specifically for each class by Mastery Manager.

Note: The equation editor in Mastery Manager is more robust than the one in Schoology.

Mastery Manager Training Videos

Mastery Manager Help Resource for Item Bank 2