The school year is coming to a close and it’s time to evaluate all that your students have learned. Although your time together is winding down, end-of year-assessments, also known as summative assessments, provide a way for you to positively impact your students for years to come.
Despite being conducted late in the school year, end-of-year assessments offer a unique set of advantages that cannot be found as predominantly in other forms of testing. Their distinct but broad benefits positively impact both students and teachers.
End-of-year assessments measure whether or not learning objectives set at the beginning of the school year have been met and to what extent. The assessments are also sometimes compared with benchmark data from years past. Benchmark data can come from within your school, state or from comprehensive national averages.
When conducted effectively, teachers can use end-of-year assessments to identify strengths and weaknesses within classroom instruction or curriculum implementation and alter each as necessary. Information acquired from assessments is also valuable at the administrative level and can be taken into account when planning for the next school year.
For most schools, grade-level instruction is not complete until the end of quarter four which marks the end of the school year. However, if your school does not follow a traditional calendar, you can consider the end of instruction to be whenever you finish teaching the last of your objectives set for that time period. No matter when your school year formally ends, it is best to begin end-of-year assessments when you feel that your learning objectives have been fully taught and are ready to be measured.
Summative tests will likely involve a greater variety of material than their formative counterparts, however; that does not mean that they have to be drawn-out and exhausting. Learning Without Tears has testing tools that can be used to measure students’ performance at the end of the school year, our Pre-K Assessments and The Screener of Handwriting Proficiency. Each assessment takes no more than 15 minutes.
Our Pre-K Assessments are designed in a developmentally appropriate manner, specifically for preschool students. Assessments are simple, easy to understand and presented in a format that they are used to. As a result, they provide a very accurate summary of children’s foundation skills.
The Screener of Handwriting Proficiency assesses students’ handwriting abilities and identifies specific areas that need improvement. The screener works with all handwriting curricula and can be administered to the whole class. When utilized at the end of the year, the screener can be used to plan handwriting instruction, specific and general for the upcoming school year.
Each assessment is easy to administer and can be conducted by teachers, therapists, families and other responsible figures. Results can be shared with these same figures or anyone else involved in students’ academic development. The assessments double as formative tests and can be used for ongoing remediation.
Visit our website to download Learning Without Tears assessments for free and learn how you can help your students succeed for years to come.