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Backward Design
Beginning With The End in Mind to |
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Step 2: Designing the Summative Assessment
This is the origin of the phrase, “beginning with the end in mind.” The summative assessment is the culminating task that will require students to draw upon the skills and concepts they have developed throughout the unit in order to demonstrate their understanding. Traditional units tests (with multiple-choice, true/false, and short answer questions) are poor summative assessments because they rarely require the application of skills and concepts or the demonstration of understanding. Summative assessments must require the application of skills, concepts, and understandings, rather than a mere reporting of information. Sometimes these types of summative assessments are called performance assessments because they require students to apply skills, concepts, and understandings to a new problem in a different context or to a different text(s). The best summative assessments often incorporate the essential question(s) that have focused the unit, requiring students to answer one or more of the essential questions drawing upon ideas from personal experience, from the texts studied, and from new text(s) encountered as a part of the assessment.
You may be asking, “How can I design an assessment before I teach a unit?” To be able to do this, you need to decide what is essential for students to know and then determine how students will demonstrate their understanding. Designing your assessment must occur early in the planning process to give both you and your students a clear destination for the unit; the teacher is then able to create the best roadmap for the learning experiences required to get there. Some considerations are:
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