Introduction
There exists an instructional supervision dilemma, which is essentially a self-created crisis that is caused by absence of definition, exercise, and legitimate understanding of current social dissatisfaction with the schooling and the schools. Instructional supervision thus has been closely considered as a performer or teacher observation by a commonly-agreed-to- be- exceptional performer or simply a supervisor. Thus, a supervisor’s excellence rests upon him or her proving his or her teaching ability and the mastery of content.
In Instructional supervision, formative evaluation refers to an assessment that is used to monitor the student learning so as to provide the ongoing feedback, which can essentially be used by the instructors to improve or advance their teaching and by the students to improve or advance their learning. Therefore, formative evaluation is crucial in analyzing the students learning and achievements, learning materials, and the teacher effectiveness. This type of evaluation is basically a building process that accumulates series of components of the skills, new materials, and difficulties into a final meaningful whole. For instance, a teacher asking the students to submit a sentence or two that identify the main point after a lecture is a good example of formative evaluation. Another example is when an instructor asks the students to draw a given concept map in the classroom that represent their understanding of a certain topic.
On the other hand, summative evaluation is a process where an instructor evaluates the student learning at end of a certain instructional unit through comparing it against a given benchmark or some standard. Therefore, it is an after the fact course evaluation. The examples of summative evaluation include a final project, a midterm exam, a senior recital, or a paper.
There are some guidelines to difficult summative evaluation area as described by the authors. These include planning and evaluation, producing lesson plans, producing authentic assessment procedures, learning activity designs, and student work samples that portray achievement of a number of facets or dimensions or desired levels of understanding. In my opinion, these are fundamental guidelines, which ensure that the problems in summative evaluation area are dealt with accordingly.
