Formative and summative assessment

The formative and the summative assessment may look the same in their external implementation, but the purpose of the assessment differs. In both cases, it is about the same goals and criteria and meeting the same reliability and validity. While the purpose of the summative assessment, assessment of learning, is to gather information about the student's knowledge or skills at a certain time and announce the results in the form of grades or other assessment information, the formative assessment is about supporting the student's learning during the course of the work, i.e. assessment for learning. The student needs to be aware of which parts of the work are summatively assessed and the timing of this.

"The main part of the assessment during the studies is formative in nature. Then the assessment and response are given during the academic year as part of the daily teaching and daily work." (Finnish National Board of Education, 2014, p. 52)

Formative assessment is a complex approach and despite the fact that formative assessment is described in various governing documents, the implementation largely reflects the teacher's teaching philosophy and view of learning.

In various national curricula, the learning objectives are written out for the various subjects. Often, the student's performance is assessed summatively against the goals in the curriculum at the latest at the end of the school year. Some goals are difficult or even impossible to assess summatively, let alone assess them with numerical grades. In the Finnish curriculum in the subject of environmental studies (grades 3 – 6), for example, objective 1 "to arouse and maintain the student's interest in the environment and the teaching of environmental studies and to help the student realize that all subject areas in environmental studies are important to him" is assessed only formative. 

Similarly, it is challenging or impossible for teachers to summatively assess students' attitudes, values and various competencies. This does not mean that discussions about attitudes and values about, for example, various sustainability-related issues are less important than discussions about specific subject knowledge issues. Both discussions are needed, and in connection with sustainability-related issues, both subject knowledge, skills, values, competences and attitudes are often included.

The more detailed description of the concepts of socialization and subjectification is rarely found in the individual learning objectives for the various subjects in the curricula. Often the description is found in the curriculum's description of the value base. This is the case, for example, in the Finnish curriculum where the description of the value base contains sub-areas such as humanity, education, equality, democracy, cultural diversity and sustainable lifestyle.