Tips for Summative Assessments

A quick guide to creating and using summative assessments 

Summative assessment is one of those pedagogical terms that often frightens students, confuses parents and gets thrown around casually by teachers. Essentially, a summative assessment is a task that allows teachers to evaluate student learning at the end of a unit or topic. They can take various forms, including:

• topic tests
• unit exams
• research assignments
• major projects
• presentations
• reports
• log books.

They are primarily used for grading or data collection purposes and at a senior level, they also contribute to a student’s final ATAR score. Therefore, creating good summative assessments and preparing students for these tasks is pivotal for assessing student outcomes and supporting their learning progress. 

Creating effective summative assessment tasks

A well-designed summative assessment task provides a fair challenge to students while still allowing all students to demonstrate the knowledge and skills that they have developed throughout a unit or topic. This means that the task should be accessible for all students, regardless of their level, while still providing an adequate challenge for higher-achieving students. 

Backwards planning is one useful approach for creating summative assessment tasks. It involves three steps

1. examining curriculum outcomes
2. creating a task to meet these outcomes
3. planning lessons in a unit of work around the task

Subject syllabuses or Study Designs are the go-to guides for curriculum outcomes and assessment task advice. Exposing students to a range of task types throughout the year that align to curriculum outcomes, while still providing them with opportunities to practise the skills they’ll need for their end-of-year examinations, is a great way to ensure that there’ll be no surprises when the final assessment period comes around. 

Using summative assessment results to inform teaching 

Data collected from summative assessments provides strong evidence of teaching and student learning. Tracking student data in a spreadsheet, such as in a Guttman chart, can allow teachers to see and analyse student performance on different parts of a task. This can help identify areas of a unit that may not have been as successfully taught as intended or pinpoint students who require targeted assistance in a particular skill or knowledge area. Classroom data can also be cross referenced with state data (such as data obtained by the Victorian Assessment Software System (VASS)) to recognise opportunities to help students better prepare for external examinations. 

While summative assessment data provides a good indication of student learning, it is not the only resource that guides the planning of learning programs. Formative tasks, standardised testing data, and in-class anecdotal evidence should work alongside summative assessments to help inform your teaching practice.

Helping students to prepare for summative assessment tasks 

The type of summative assessment tasks that teachers plan to deliver will change the way that they approach preparation with their students. But a key thing to remember is that the task itself, its content and outcomes, and the way students will be assessed should not come as a surprise to students. 

The best way to ensure that there are no surprises is to provide students with relevant resources and examples prior to the summative assessment task. This can be in the form of practice questions and their marking schemes for topic tests or examinations, assessment criteria or rubrics, or exemplar tasks for research assignments or lab reports. These examples will help students to build familiarity with the expectations of the task while also giving them opportunities to prepare so that they can achieve their best when the real thing comes along. Marking and providing feedback for these practice assessments can also guide students to recognise the areas in which they can improve on and prioritise during their study time. 

Teachers have demanding workloads throughout the year and, even with the best intentions, it can be challenging to consistently provide every student with individualised, detailed feedback during busy periods. When this is the case, activities such as peer marking of practice tasks in class, self-assessment against exemplars and marking criteria, or whole class analysis of anonymous sample responses can be completed during class time to help lighten the workload while still providing students with feedback opportunities before the summative task. 

To get the most out of summative assessment tasks, it is important to ensure that they closely reflect curriculum outcomes, provide students with a chance to showcase their learning, and are used to inform future teaching. Neap resources, such as the VCE, HSC, QCE and WACE trial exams, can be used alongside other summative assessments to give teachers an insight into how students are progressing with their learning and help them identify areas for improvement.

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This article is authored by Mel Nantsou, an experienced Environmental Science, Biology and Marine Science teacher. Mel has worked with Neap to develop various resources, including VCE trial exams and NICE Science: Years 11 and 12 – Neap's science investigation, communication and ethics reference book for teachers. To learn more about Mel’s teaching experience and her tips creating and using assessment resources in the classroom, check out our recent contributor spotlight.