summative

S1U1M3M3A1T1I1V4E1
UK/ˈsʌm.ə.tɪv/Canada, US[ˈsʌm.ə.ɾɪv]Australia/ˈsam.ə.tɪv/Australia[ˈsam.ə.ɾɪv]

adjective

Synonym of additive.

“summative assessment”

Similar
additivesummarizing[participial adjective|part. adj.]]>abstractivesummarysummational
Less commonScrabble 16

Meanings

adjectivesummative (not comparable)
  1. Of, pertaining to, or produced by summation.
    1. not comparableSynonym of additive.

      Synonyms: additive

    2. not comparableSynonym of summary (adjective).

      Near-synonym: abstractive

      Synonyms: summarizing[participial adjective|part. adj.]]>, abstractive, summary

  2. not comparableeducationDenoting forms of assessment used to quantify educational outcomes.

    summative assessment

nounsummative (plural summatives)

plural summatives

  1. educationA summative assessment; a test that assesses what a student learned during a course of study.

    Summatives, on the other hand, are used for comparisons between schools and districts.

    2015, Michael K. Raible, Every Child, Every Day, page 22
    2 more examples

    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

    All of this was great, and there were many summatives that we loved for many reasons. Since becoming standards based, however, our thoughts on summatives have changed.

    2018, Emily Rinkema, Stan Williams, The Standards-Based Classroom: Make Learning the Goal, page 58
  2. human sciencesA 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

    3 more examples

    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

    Summarizers and Concluders (Quirk et al. 1985: summatives) may signal the last element in a list ( 'finally' ) or be used to sum up ( English: 'altogether', 'then' , 'therefore' , and more formal expressions like 'to conclude', 'in conclusion'; Italian: 'In/in breve', 'Allo scopo di sintetizzare).

    2015, Jesús Romero-Trillo, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2015, page 250

    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
  3. A cumulative measure.
    1 more example

    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 positions and summatives.'

    2022, Simon Grima, Ercan Özen, Inna Romānova, Managing Risk and Decision Making in Times of Economic Distress

Synonyms & antonyms

adjectiveSynonym of additive.

Similar

adjectiveSynonym of summary (adjective).

Similar
summarizing[participial adjective|part. adj.]]>abstractivesummary

More synonyms by meaning

adjectiveof or relating to a summation or produced by summation

Synonym sets from Open English WordNet, CC BY 4.0.

Origin

Cite this entry
APA

summative. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/summative

MLA

“summative.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/summative. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “summative,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/summative.

Source: summative on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.