Word.ws English Dictionary

summative

/ˈsʌm.ə.tɪv/US/ˈsʌm.ə.tɪv/

summative adjective: synonym of additive.

Adjective

summative (not comparable)

  1. Synonym of additive.
    Synonyms:
    additive
  2. Synonym of summary (adjective).
    • Near-synonym: abstractive
    Synonyms:
    summarizing[participial adjective|part. adj.]]>, abstractive, summary
  3. Denoting forms of assessment used to quantify educational outcomes.
    • summative assessment

Noun

summative (plural summatives)

  1. A summative assessment; a test that assesses what a student learned during a course of study.
    • The reson a summative evaluation might not be available at this point is that it is not unusual to offer summatives for more than one objective as opposed to offering summatives for each objective.1989, David A. Jacobsen, David Jacobsen, Paul D. Eggen, Methods for Teaching: A Skills Approach, page 215
    • Summatives, on the other hand, are used for comparisons between schools and districts.2015, Michael K. Raible, Every Child, Every Day, page 22
  2. A word or phrase, such as "in short" or "therefore", that signals that the area of the utterance (text or speech) that contains it is summarizing a larger body of information.
    • Holonym: metadiscourse
    • The immediate future work is the treatment of summatives (with "total") and symmetric phrases (with the "same").2015, Oleg Kiselyov, “Canonical Constituents and Non-canonical Coordination”, in Tsuyoshi Murata, Koji Mineshima, Daisuke Bekki, editor, New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence
  3. A cumulative measure.
    • The ECB (2021a, 2021b, 2021c), for example, has allowed its supervising banks to operate temporarily under the LCR, and the Swedish regulator (Reuters, 2020) has extended this to various currencies, allowing banks to 'temporarily fall below the liquidity ration (LCR) for individual foreign exchange...2022, Simon Grima, Ercan Özen, Inna Romānova, Managing Risk and Decision Making in Times of Economic Distress

Examples of summative in a sentence

  • All of this was great, and there were many summatives that we loved for many reasons.2018, Emily Rinkema, Stan Williams, The Standards-Based Classroom: Make Learning the Goal, page 58:
  • Sometimes the summative is the center of the paragraph, long or short, as when she describes her first husband, the Brewer, in a short paragraph that, "in short," "cut[s] short a dull Story" (10).2019, Cynthia Wall, Grammars of Approach, page 184:

Synonyms of summative

Forms of summative

pluralsummatives

Origin of summative

From sum + -ative.

Words formed from summative

Questions about summative

What does summative mean?
Summative means synonym of additive.
How do you use summative in a sentence?
All of this was great, and there were many summatives that we loved for many reasons.
What part of speech is summative?
Summative can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce summative?
Summative is pronounced /ˈsʌm.ə.tɪv/ (UK).

Words near summative in the dictionary

  1. summation methods
  2. summation plural
  3. summation plurals
  4. summational
  5. summations
  6. summative
  7. summatively
  8. summatives
  9. summator
  10. summators
  11. summatory

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: summative (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-summative.wav.

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