Formal and Informal Assessment

Formal assessments are systematic, preplanned methods of testing students that are used
to determine how well students have learned the material that is being taught in the
classroom. In other words, formal assessments provide a way of answering the question,
'What do the students know?'
Example:
1. Standardized tests are assessments in which the questions, instructions, scoring, and the
way the test is administered are done in exactly the same way across individuals.
Standardized tests are primarily used as a means to compare a student's knowledge and
skills in a particular area to those of other students in the nation. Examples of standardized
tests include:
The Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills
The Stanford Achievement Test
The ACT
2. Program tests, also called teacher-made tests, are used to measure how well a student is
able to understand and remember specific content. Examples of program tests include:
Class projects
Class presentations
Quizzes and tests
Informal assessments are those that are used to evaluate a student's own performance and
progress, individually. In the classroom, these take numerous forms and are simply the
teacher's, student's, and parent's way of measuring that student's progress.
Example:
1. Observation is a valuable tool for assessing many types of development in students.
With young children, observation can give the teacher a clear picture of, for example,
the childs motor or language development. Emerging skills can be noted as well as skills
already mastered. Teachers routinely use observation as they are teaching new skills to
their students when they walk around the room and see how students are progressing
with their assignments, or as they ask questions as the lesson progress.
2. Checklists are often referred to as scope and sequence of skills measures. A checklist is
merely a list of the learning objectives for a particular age, grade or subject matter. The
teacher checks off each skill as the student exhibits proficiency in that area. Many
checklists are teacher-made, while others may be standardized. They are completed
with a negative or positive response; the student either knows the material or does not.

Formative and Summative Assessment
Formative assessment refers to a wide variety of methods that teachers use to conduct in-
process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress
during a lesson, unit, or course. Formative assessments help teachers identify concepts that
students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning
standards they have not yet achieved so that adjustments can be made to lessons,
instructional techniques, and academic support.
The general goal of formative assessment is to collect detailed information that can be used
to improve instruction and student learning while its happening. What makes an
assessment formative is not the design of a test, technique, or self-evaluation, per se, but
the way it is usedi.e., to inform in-process teaching and learning modifications.
Example
1. Questions that teachers pose to individual students and groups of students during the
learning process to determine what specific concepts or skills they may be having
trouble with. A wide variety of intentional questioning strategies may be employed,
such as phrasing questions in specific ways to elicit more useful responses.
2. Self-assessments that ask students to think about their own learning process, to reflect
on what they do well or struggle with, and to articulate what they have learned or still
need to learn to meet course expectations or learning standards.

Summative assessments are used to evaluate student learning, skill acquisition, and
academic achievement at the conclusion of a defined instructional periodtypically at the
end of a project, unit, course, semester, program, or school year. Generally speaking
Example:
1. Focus groups use a facilitator and a semi-structured interview process to prompt
discussion amongst a group of people. The group can be representative of the target
group, or they may represent subsets of the target group if you are looking to identify
how different groups have experienced a certain intervention. Focus groups can be used
in a self-contained manner for the purposes of exploring new initiatives or for
understanding participants own perspectives on a project.
2. Storytelling provides a powerful means to obtain information on a projects outcomes
from participant s experiences and viewpoints. Storytelling provides meaningful
information that can highlight both the strong points and weaknesses of a project, as
well as any unintended consequences. In a way, by asking participants to provide a story
on a project, it asks them to evaluate an aspect of a project, rather than provide
information for someone else to place a value on, storytelling generally brings out
memorable or momentous experiences.


Norm-Referenced Assessment and Criterion-Referenced Assessment
Norm-Referenced Assessment: This is assessment that is based on comparing the relative
performances of students, either by comparing the performances of individual students
within the group being tested, or by comparing their performance with that of others of
similar age, experience and background. Such assessment may simply involve ranking the
students, or may involve scaling their marks or grades so that they fall on a standard
distribution of some sort.
1. Multiple-choice teststhe dominant norm-referenced formatare better suited to
measuring remembered facts than more complex forms of thinking. Consequently,
norm-referenced tests promote rote learning and memorization in schools over more
sophisticated cognitive skills, such as writing, critical reading, analytical thinking,
problem solving, or creativity.
2. Although testing experts and test developers warn that major educational decisions
should not be made on the basis of a single test score, norm-referenced scores are often
misused in schools when making critical educational decisions, such as grade promotion
or retention, which can have potentially harmful consequences for some students and
student groups.
Criterion-Referenced Assessment: A test or other type of assessment designed to provide a
measure of performance that is interpretable in terms of a clearly defined and delimited
domain of learning tasks.
The following are a few representative examples of how criterion-referenced tests and
scores may be used:
1. To evaluate the effectiveness of teachers by factoring test results into job-performance
evaluations. For a related discussion, see value-added measures.
2. To measure the academic achievement of students in a given state, usually for the
purposes of comparing academic performance among schools and districts.
Discrete-point and Integrative tests
Discrete Point tests are based on an analytical view of language. This is where language is
divided up so that components of it may be tested. Discrete point tests aim to achieve a
high reliability factor by testing a large number of discrete items. From these separated
parts, you can form an opinion is which is then applied to language as an entity.
You may recognise some of the following Discrete Point tests:
1. Phoneme recognition.
2. Yes/No, True/ False answers.
3. Spelling.
4. Word completion.
5. Grammar items.
6. Most multiple choice tests.
Such tests have a down side in that they take language out of context and usually bear no
relationship to the concept or use of whole language.
Integrative; In order to overcome the above defect, you should consider Integrative tests.
Such tests usually require the testees to demonstrate simultaneous control over several
aspects of language, just as they would in real language use situations.
Examples of Integrative tests that you may be familiar with include:
1. Cloze tests
2. Dictation
3. Translation
4. Essays and other coherent writing tasks
5. Oral interviews and conversation
6. Reading, or other extended samples of real text