Which assessment type is best for gauging ongoing student understanding?

Formative assessments are specifically designed to monitor student learning and provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. This type of assessment occurs during the learning process, allowing educators to gauge understanding in real-time. This continuous feedback loop helps identify areas where students may be struggling, enabling timely interventions.

For instance, formative assessments can include quizzes, class discussions, peer reviews, or observations, all of which provide valuable insight into student comprehension and skills as they develop. The focus here is on enhancing the learning experience rather than evaluating it at the end, which is the hallmark of summative assessments.

In contrast, summative assessments evaluate student learning at the conclusion of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. While these are important for determining what students have learned after the fact, they do not provide the ongoing insights that formative assessments do.

Diagnostic assessments serve to identify students' existing knowledge, skills, and misconceptions prior to instruction, which differs from the ongoing nature of formative assessments. Lastly, standardized assessments are typically used for accountability purposes and comparison across different populations or educational systems, rather than for the specific, continuous monitoring of understanding within a classroom context.

Therefore, formative assessments stand out as