Abstract:

Nowadays, teaching has become an art rather than just delivering information to the students. As the ways of teaching have been altered, the tools for assessment have become more elaborate. While summative assessment used to be of paramount importance in the previous centuries, modern-day education is apt to put the emphasis on the superiority of formative assessment considering using it to be an imperative for any teacher. Summative assessment aims at evaluating the students mostly at the end of the semesters and obviously, it provides the students with the information about their learning progress but through the marks only. No doubt that these numbers are pretty beneficial but they do not really convey any real feedback pivotal for the students to self-develop. In comparison with summative assessment, formative assessment is a consecutive process equipping students with detailed feedback about their strengths and weaknesses, about their evolution in their studies, about the things they excel at, etc. This permanent feedback greatly avails students to constantly scrutinize their flaws and dedicate themselves to transferring these flaws into strengths. This process avails students to foster their analytic and cognitive skills and this itself leads to much more enhanced academic performance. In order to have our claims grounded, research was conducted at BAU International University, Batumi. Using the method of direct observation and student surveys, we endeavored to reveal the real benefits of formative assessment. Six different groups of students were observed in the span of six semesters, where three groups were constantly assessed with summative assessment and three of them using the formative one. The results were striking and unexpected. As it turned out, thorough formative assessment not only improved the accuracy and performance of the students inside the classroom, but also enhanced the students' motivation to be fully involved in class work and to vie for better evaluation of the teachers. So, obviously, the given work attempts to show the superiority of formative assessment over the summative one and draws conclusions on the examples of nearly one hundred young learners involved in the research.

Keywords:

Formative, assessment, education, summative, performance.