How formative are assessments for learning activities towards summative assessment?

To academics of higher education institutes, motiving, enhancing and improving student learning have never been easy. Different types of course work or continuous assessment or assessment for learning activities are designed to lead students to achieve the intended learning outcomes of respective courses. Depending on the nature of courses, these activities vary and they can either be done individually or in groups. The question is whether these activities can achieve their stated goals or if they can, how much these activities can lead students to achieve the intended learning outcomes as reflected by a summative assessment, normally it is a timed final exam or a take-home final essay. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the correlations between formative assessment activities and the summative assessment. Data of an introductory statistics course of different cohorts of a private degree-granting institute in Hong Kong were used in this study. The results indicate that individual assignments have a strong relationship with the exam score, while group projects do not. More surprisingly, group projects are negatively related to exam scores. The implication is that academics should rethink how to make group work a better and fairer assessment for individual student’s contribution.