Clarifying the purposes of educational assessment

Abstract

This article concerns the importance of clarity in thinking and talking about certain core concepts of educational assessment. It begins by identifying three quite distinct interpretations of the term ‘assessment purpose’. It continues by challenging the supposed distinction between ‘formative’ and ‘summative’—arguing that the latter only applies to a kind of assessment result while the former only applies to a kind of use of assessment results. It ends by illustrating the wide range of uses to which assessment results might be put and stresses the importance of not concealing important distinctions by locating multiple discrete purposes within a small number of misleading categories.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Andrew Boyle, Jeremy Tafler and Mike Kane for comments on an earlier version of this paper. None of the views expressed should be taken to represent those of my employer, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.

Notes

1. Perhaps more than most assessment terms, the term ‘grading’ will have different connotations in different countries. For example, in the USA, it is often associated with the generation of grade point averages, which are used for purposes such as selection. Even in this context, though, it tends not to denote one specific purpose (and exclude others).

2. A reviewer of the first draft of this paper posed a quite reasonable question: why had it not even mentioned the distinction – in Table 1 – between categories of purpose based upon individual judgements (e.g., selection) and categories based upon aggregated judgements (e.g., system monitoring). My response is straightforward. The motivation behind this paper was to discourage spurious categorization and to focus attention upon levels at which distinctions really matter, i.e., matter for the design of assessment systems and for the intelligent use of assessment results. This means looking beyond simplistic distinctions (e.g., individual versus aggregated) to finer‐grained distinctions (e.g., system monitoring versus comparability) and to even finer‐grained distinctions still (e.g., long‐term versus short‐term monitoring).