What a Study on the Thoughts and Beliefs in Assessments Reveals About Our Thinking on Summative and Formative Assessment

Assessment’s increasing prominence in educational discourses and practices, especially in the past 20 years, has not always resulted in increasing clarity as to what the new terms in vogue actually mean. Questions include: does carrying out formative assessment really mean that we have to duplicate assessment; is summative assessment inevitably linked to problems and negative perceptions, as the UK’s National Student Survey results seem to indicate; are summative and formative assessment different beasts or are they two sides of the same coin as Scriven (1967) noted when he made the original distinction; is assessment really our weakest link? By asking questions to ascertain tutor beliefs and understandings, we clarify the areas where these misunderstandings arise in a Bahraini context. This work builds on research in different contexts which similarly found that the clarity of our assessment understandings is tainted by contradictions in the literature. The questionnaire used here asked neutral questions on assessment and collected both quantitative and qualitative data. Several responses were consistent, all: used formative assessment, associated it with feedback, which appears essential in their perception, and almost all valued theory. However, inconsistencies were in: definitions of formative and summative assessment, their functions and uses, and the relationship between them. How we interpret the results, to some degree, reflects our epistemological and theoretical positions; even though most of the data were unambiguous. By questioning our own beliefs, we found that we are not immune to our emotions and hopes influencing our interpretations.