Writing in 1967, Michael Scriven suggested two roles that evaluation might play. On the one hand,“it may have a role in the on-going improvement of the curriculum”(p. 41); in another role, the evaluation process may serve to enable administrators to decide whether the entire finished curriculum, refined by use of the evaluation process in its first role, represents a sufficiently significant advance on the available alternatives to justify the expense of adoption by a school system (pp. 41–42).
He then proposed “to use the terms ‘formative’and ‘summative’evaluation to qualify evaluation in these roles”(p. 43). Benjamin Bloom (1969) suggested 2 years later that the same distinction might be applied to the evaluation of student learning—what we today would tend to call assessment. He acknowledged the traditional role that tests played in judging and classifying students, but noted that there was another role for evaluation: