Formative and Summative Assessment
First off, what are formative and summative assessments?
The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. Formative assessments: help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work. Examples or formative assessment may include: in-class discussions, homework, weekly quizzes, or end-of-class exit tickets.
The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. Examples of summative assessment may include end of term/semester/unit exams, final projects/papers/presentations, or standardized tests.
In a sentence, formative assessment is assessment for learning and summative assessment is assessment of learning.