ABSTRACT
Summative assessments provide information about a student’s final learning status at the end of a unit or course. Students can use this information as feedback to make adjustments to their approaches to learning to reach future goals. The goal of summative assessments is to evaluate and summarize student learning while maintaining student motivation, confidence, and desire to learn. Designing summative assessments that are both conclusive and authentic helps achieve this goal. Summative assessments are conclusive when they include all of the most important learning goals and a sampling of the smaller goals, and the evidence regarding student standing relative to clear standards is unambiguous. Summative assessments are authentic when students do a task that reflects a context outside of school, often in a demonstration or performance. There are potential pitfalls with summative assessments, which can be demotivating to students and lead to decreased effort and learning, especially among lower ability students.
