Education Technology Services
Types of assessments in education: Formative vs. summative
Assessments are fundamental to education. They help evaluate student performance, guide teaching strategies, and ensure learning outcomes. As education evolves with technological advancements, understanding the primary types of assessments in education—formative and summative—is vital. Both play distinct but complementary roles in the learning process, supporting educators in creating dynamic and effective learning environments.
This article explores the role of AI and analytics tools for both formative and summative evaluations, offering deeper insights into student progress for more informed decisions and improved learning outcomes across education.
Formative assessments: driving continuous improvement
Formative assessments are ongoing evaluations designed to monitor student learning in real-time. These assessments provide immediate feedback, enabling students to refine their understanding and educators to adjust teaching methods accordingly.
Key benefits of AI in enhancing formative assessments
Research shows that students using AI-driven formative assessments achieve higher grades and better comprehension compared to traditional methods. AI significantly reduces grading time while improving accuracy, enabling educators to focus more on teaching than administrative tasks.
- Personalised feedback and differentiated instruction: AI tools, like automated essay scoring and adaptive systems, provide dynamic, individualised feedback tailored to each student's needs, enhancing instructional strategies.
- Reduced teacher workload: AI automates tasks such as grading and scheduling, enabling educators to focus on creative and instructional roles reducing administrative burdens.
- Tracking learning progress: AI uses cognitive models to monitor student growth, identifying learning trajectories and areas for improvement.
- Assessment of broader learning attributes: AI analyses non-academic traits like engagement, collaboration, and critical thinking.
- Enhanced peer and scalable assessments: AI improves peer review quality and facilitates large-scale assessments, ensuring accuracy and scalability.
Summative assessments: evaluating mastery
ummative assessments evaluate mastery by measuring cumulative knowledge at the end of a learning unit, providing a comprehensive view of student performance and achievement. These assessments ensure that learning goals are met and can guide future curriculum adjustments.
Key benefits of AI in summative assessments
AI is enhancing summative assessments in education by streamlining processes, improving accuracy, and scaling evaluations. These tools offer more precise, efficient evaluations, helping educators identify areas for curriculum enhancement and improving the overall assessment experience.
- Automated grading and consistent scoring: AI-powered tools evaluate complex responses like essays with speed and accuracy, providing uniform scoring while reducing human biases.
- Adaptive and fair assessments: AI dynamically adjusts question difficulty based on student performance, ensuring tailored evaluations that accurately reflect individual abilities.
- Detailed performance analytics: Advanced AI systems analyse large datasets to uncover trends, enabling educators to identify strengths and weaknesses and refine instructional strategies.
- Assessment of complex skills: Innovative AI tools measure higher-order skills like critical thinking and problem-solving using multimedia and game-based evaluations.
- Scalable and efficient testing: AI facilitates large-scale assessments by automating scheduling, proctoring, and result processing, ensuring efficiency and accessibility across diverse contexts.
Challenges in AI-based formative and summative assessments
Teachers often lack the necessary skills and access to big data required for effective AI implementation, necessitating professional development that adds to their workload. AI models frequently prioritise accuracy over interpretability, complicating the analysis of results and requiring teachers to validate and address biases in outputs. AI tools, while efficient, are limited in assessing higher-order skills like creativity and reasoning, emphasising the need for teacher oversight.
Ethical concerns, including data privacy and algorithmic biases, demand cautious handling to prevent over-reliance on AI in decision-making. Finally, ensuring the validity and reliability of AI systems, particularly for assessing complex skills, remains an ongoing challenge. By addressing these challenges, AI can significantly enhance both formative and summative assessments, delivering more efficient, equitable, and insightful evaluations.
Bridging formative vs. summative assessments with AI
Formative versus summative assessments can be problematic because they often require different approaches, which can lead to inconsistent evaluation of student progress. AI can address the challenges of formative vs summative assessments by integrating real-time feedback with final evaluations. AI tools can offer continuous tracking of student progress, blending the ongoing insights from formative assessments with the conclusive results of summative evaluations. Additionally, AI-driven platforms can provide a more holistic and dynamic evaluation by analysing both immediate and cumulative student data, bridging the gap between the two assessment types. This integration of both methods through AI ensures that the evaluation is continuous, comprehensive, and more aligned with student growth.
How can Infosys BPM help?
As the demand for personalised and efficient learning solutions grows, the EdTech industry is poised to play a pivotal role in reshaping education. Embracing these innovations will empower educators and learners alike, enhancing personalisation and adaptability in learning environments.
Infosys BPM unlocks the full potential of your assessment process with Infosys Wingspan Assessment Services. Streamline test creation, secure proctoring, and real-time analytics while reducing time, effort, and costs by up to 60%. Our AI-driven platform offers intelligent anomaly detection, plagiarism reporting, and tailored assessment options—from coding to behavioural skills.