The Importance of Assessment Literacy: Formative and Summative Assessment Instruments and Techniques

© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.Almost sixty years after Scriven and Bloom¿s accurate description and differentiation between summative and formative assessment, it would be quite vain to make sure that educators nowadays fully understand and use these two types of evaluation in their practice. Besides, it would be riskier to expect educators to use programs or design AI algorithms to make appropriate decisions to select and design instruments to make accurate judgments about learning and performance results without considering the difficulties in learning evaluation practices that have arisen in different educational contexts. The understanding of paradigms, educational models, and beliefs of educators around assessment practices constitutes mandatory tasks to consider as a point of departure in the era of ICT for learning purposes. Thus, the main objective of this chapter is to review the importance of evaluation literacy towards the complex challenge of planning, designing instruments, and interpreting results derived from learning assessment. Then, a reflection on the advances and difficulties found by researchers in different countries on formative and summative practices and results in higher education mainly is discussed. By the end of this chapter, some recommendations related to educator's training for improving and reinforcing conceptual and instrumental assessment practices are envisaged.

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