Chapter 2

Review of Literature

This chapter presents the review of literature on the summative assessment.

Summative Assessment

Assessment is a term that covers any activity in which evidence of learning is collected in

a planned and systematic way, and is used to make a judgment about learning. Assessment is

summative in function if the purpose is to summarise the learning that had taken place in order to

grade, certificate or record progress. When summative assessment is used for making decisions

that affect the status or future of students, teachers or schools, the demand for reliability of

measures often means that tests are used in order closely to control the nature of the information

and the conditions in which it is collected (Harlen & Crick, 2002). Summative assessment is

defined by Dunn and Mulvenon (2009) as the evaluation of assessment based data for the

purposes of assessing academic progress at the end of specified time period (i.e., a unit of

material or an entire school year) for the purposes of establishing a students academic standing

relative to some established criterion.

Related Studies

Black, Harrison, Hodgen, Marshall and Serret (2010) conducted a project that combined

both intervention and research elements which set out to explore and develop teachers

understanding and practices in their summative assessments that are used on a regular basis

within schools for guiding the progress of pupils and for internal accountability. The intervention
aimed both to explore how teachers might improve those practices in the light of their re

examination of their validity, and to engage them in moderation exercises within and between

schools to audit examples of students work and to discuss their appraisals of these examples.

This paper reports findings, arising from this work, of the research that aimed to study how

teachers understand validity, and how they formulate their classroom assessment practices in the

light of that understanding. The paper also considers how that understanding might be challenged

and developed. It was found that teachers attention to validity issues had been undermined by

the external test regimes.

Examining the reliability and validity of the administered summative assessment would

be of help in future constructions of summative tests to gain improvement and maintenance of

test questions and structures. The review on the teachers feedback on summative test

construction will serve as a gauge to the development of planning programs in the scope of the

present study.

Another study by Lopez and Pasquini (2017) examined the two

collaborative research projects whose common goal was to explore the potential role of

professional controversies in building teachers summative assessment capacity. In the first

project, upper primary teachers were encouraged to compare their practices through a form of

social moderation, without prior instructor input or theoretical preparation. In the second project,

lower secondary school teachers were encouraged to compare

their summative assessment practices with reference to a theoretical model of curriculum

alignment, under the guidance of an instructor. The findings support the potentially constructive

role of professional controversies in supporting teachers professional development

for summative assessment. They highlight the status of references called upon in discussion of

controversies, and their contribution to the construction of the subjects under discussion.

The role of teachers and capacity in the development of summative assessments are

considered to be crucial since their practices will greatly contribute to the test construction of

summative assessment.
 A study of Harlen (2007) on the systematic review of research on the reliability and

validity of teachers assessment used for summative purposes also addressed the question on

what conditions affect the reliability and validity of teachers summative assessment. The initial

search for studies meeting the explicit inclusion criteria of relevance found 431potentially

relevant studies. This number was gradually reduced, through the systematic review procedures,

to 30 studies, which specifically addressed the review questions. These studies were subject to

indepth data extraction conducted independently by two researchers, followed by reconciliation

of any differences of interpretation. This procedure was also used to judge the weight of

evidence provided for the review by each study so that greater emphasis could be given to

findings from the most relevant and methodologically sound research. The findings of the review

by no means constitute a ringing endorsement of teachers assessment; there was evidence of low

reliability and bias in teachers judgements made in certain circumstances. However, this has to

be considered against the low validity and lower than generally assumed reliability of external

tests. The findings also point to ways of overcoming the deficiencies of teachers assessment and

lead to implications for assessment policy, practice and research, which are proposed in the final

section of the paper.

 Trusting teachers judgement: research evidence of the reliability and validity of

teachers assessment used for summative purposes

Wynne Harlen

Pages 245-270 | Published online: 18 Feb 2007

Download citation

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02671520500193744

Journal

Research Papers in Education

Volume 20, 2005 - Issue 3

Professional controversies between teachers about

their summative assessment practices: a tool for building assessment capacity

Lucie Mottier Lopez & Raphal Pasquini

Pages 228-249 | Received 06 Aug 2016, Accepted 05 Feb 2017, Published online: 28 Feb

2017

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969594X.2017.1293001
Journal

Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice

Volume 24, 2017 - Issue 2: Developing Teachers Assessment Capacity