Summative and formative assessments: Do we accommodate both?

Disability services providers and faculty often ask whether accommodations should be provided for informal or formal formative assessments. Formative assessments are intended to provide students with feedback to guide improvement in skills or knowledge and may be collected and recorded as benchmarks for performance. Unlike summative assessments, which are usually graded and thus interpreted as high stakes (e.g., exams, the Objective Structural Clinical Examination), formative assessments are thought to carry low or no stakes for students. For this reason, some suggest that accommodations are not needed. However, accommodations are provided to address a barrier in the educational environment, and as such should not be limited to summative activities.