Using Feedback with Summative Assessment

The intention of feedback is to be formative, to help students learn.  However, some excellent opportunities for providing feedback come after summative events.

Though a unit may have ended, it is never to late for feedback to be effective.  So, how should a teacher provide feedback after a summative assessment?  Susan M. Brookhart offers a few suggestions in her aptly titled How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students.

1.  Allow students to resubmit the same assignment.  I do this for the research paper my students write, and I find that it is effective at getting students to revise and incorporate the feedback. The obvious draw back...it takes a lot of time.  However, a more subtle drawback can be that the assessment changes from "indicating the achievement of certain learning goals to indicating the ability to follow the teachers directions."  Depending on how thoroughly the teacher "corrected" the errors in the paper, the student may just go through on auto-pilot and change what has been identified.  Therefore, the student is not demonstrating their mastery of commas; instead, he/she is demonstrating my mastery of commas.  I can see Brookhart's point, but I think that there are ways around this drawback if the teacher provides judicious feedback that asks questions and requires the student to problem solve instead of providing answers through extensive marking.
  
2. Provide students with another similar assignment where they can incorporate the feedback into a new situation, thereby extending their learning.  To do this, Brookhart suggests:

• for written feedback presented with the return of summative assessments (tests or assignments), explicitly tell the students when they will be able to use the feedback.

The benefit of this is that students will be more likely to read through feedback and perhaps reflect on it since they have a concrete occasion when they will need it in the future, thereby retaining its relevance.

• plan your assessments and assignments so they do give students the opportunities to improve previous work, using feedback to develop skills in writing, problem solving, making presentations, doing research, or studying.

To me this looks like deliberate scaffolding of process skills.  Though this second option seems just too easy, based on the omission of any stated drawbacks from this approach, Brookhart seems to suggest that this second approach is more effective.  I am not sure that I agree, but I need to give it more thought.  However, I can see how it would work well for a class presentation or project where many of the skills should be practiced and refined throughout a school year, but where redos would be difficult to pull off. 

After reading this section, I still do not see how either relate to large-scale summative assessments (ie: state testing) when the students do not receive their scores back until after the end of the year.  However, both options could work for in-class summative assesments at the end of a unit or project because

All students can benefit from feedback on summative assessment if you provide another opportunity to incorporate it.