Revisiting and Expanding Scriven's Fallacies About Formative and Summative Evaluation

Abstract

This article outlines the origins of the formative and summative evaluation and then revisits Scriven’s claims about eight fallacies. We add to seven further fallacies especially that there are such concepts as formative and summative assessment. The argument is to return to Scriven’s original claims that formative relates to improvement and summative relates to status, the primary purpose of formative evaluation is to stimulate summative evaluation, and both demand rigor and must lead to claims about merit, worth or significance.

Keywords

• special issue
• Michael Scriven
• in memoriam