It is expected that teachers’ practices include summative and formative assessment practices. Institutionally, summative assessment is imposed. The development of a systematic formative assessment is recommended in the curriculum. However, the use of the complex relationship (Bennett, 2011) between these two types of assessment creates tension in teachers (Santos & Pinto, 2014a), leading them to devalue formative assessment as it is confirmed by the OCDE report concerning Portugal (Santiago, Donaldson, Looney, & Nusche, 2012). This situation is even more disturbing if we look at the increase of the importance of summative assessment due to the educational policies strongly dominated by accountability (OECD, 2013), although the relevance of the formative assessments for learning is a consensual assumption nowadays. It is accepted that formative assessment is crucial and demands learner to be in the center of the assessment (Colbert & Cumming, 2014), being the relation to summative assessment still underexplored (Taras, 2005).

There is awareness in the community of the researchers interested in assessment that the articulation between summative and formative assessment is needed. Although a lot of effort has to be made to understand deeply this important issue (Black, 2013; Looney, 2011). In the last years, authors discussed the articulation between these two modes of assessment, presenting different ways to face this problematic. Some authors propose possible scenarios to deal with it (e.g. Harlen, 2006; 2010; Harlen & James, 1997), others consider an impossible or inadequate coexistence between summative and formative assessment (Shepard, 2001; Vial, 2012). From the first group of authors, arguments related with the synergies coming from both modes of assessment may be obtained by using the same information for the two purposes as well as having the same person responsible for the two assessment processes (Harlen, 2005).

Thus, in the context of a collaborative work, two middle school mathematics teachers (classes of 7^th and 8^th grade students, 12 and 13 years old) and two researchers (the authors of this communication) have been developing, since last school year, an articulation assessment process (AAP), that includes a cycle of three steps. It begins with a summative moment, represented by a written test, undergoes a formative assessment moment and ends with a summative one. In the formative moment, students develop a set of questions, similar to the ones included in the test, performed outside the class. All students must do this work. Each student has to answer only to the questions that they missed on the test. Depending on student performance, the mark of the first test can be changed. The first year results pointed out that only 63% of the 168 students accomplished the three steps of each cycle during the school year (Santos & Pinto, 2014b). In the present year, a support strategy was added to the AAP to increase not only the number of students involved but also to improve the learning process in the formative moment. This study intends to understand if this articulated assessment process allows the development of an effective formative assessment. We particularly formulated the following research questions:

• Which is the involvement of students in this articulation assessment process?

• Are the students able to improve their performance in the second step?

• Is the support strategy able to accomplish its objective? Which are its potentialities and limits?

Bennett, R. (2011). Formative assessment: a critical review. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 18(1), 5-25. Black, P. (2013). Formative and summative aspects of assessment: Theoretical and research foundations in the context of pedagogy. In J. McMillan (Ed.), Sage Handbook of Research on Classroom Assessment (pp. 167-178). London: SAGE Publications. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2007). Research methods in education. London: Routledge. Colbert, P. & Cumming, J. (2014). Enabling all students to learn through assessment. In C. Wyatt-Smith, V. Klenowski, & P. Colbert (Eds.), Designing Assessment for Quality Learning (pp, 211- 231). Australian Catholic University: Springer. Harlen, W. (2005) Teachers' summative practices and assessment for learning – tensions and synergies, The Curriculum Journal, 16(2), 207-223. Harlen, W. (2006). On the relationship between assessment for formative and summative purposes. In J. Gardner (Ed.), Assessment and learning (pp. 61-80). London: Sage Publications Ltd. Harlen, W. (2010). What is quality teacher assessment? In J. Gardner, W. Harlen, L. Hayward & G. Stobart (Eds.), Developing teacher assessment (pp. 29-52). London: McGraw-Hill Education, Open University Press. Harlen, W. & James, M. (1997). Assessment and learning: differences and relationship between formative and summative assessment. Assessment in Education, 4(3), 365-379. Looney, J. (2011). Integrating formative and summative assessment: Progress toward a seamless system? OECD Education Working Paper nº 58 (www.oecd.org/edu/workingpapers) OECD (2013). Synergies for better learning. An international perspective on evaluation and assessment. OECD Reviews of evaluation and assessment in education. Paris: OECD Publishing. Santiago, P.; Donaldson, G.; Looney, A., & Nusche, D. (2012). OECD Reviews of evaluation and assessment in education: Portugal. OECD (http://www.oecd.org/edu/evaluationpolicy) Santos, L. & Pinto, J. (2014a). Changing assessment practices: tensions between individual and institutional. Communication in the European Conference on Educational Research, ECER 2014, 1st to 5th September, Oporto. Santos, L. & Pinto, J. (2014b). Articulating summative and formative assessment practices. Communication in the 15th Annual Conference of AEA Europe, 6th-8th November, 2014, Tallin. Shepard, L. (2001). The role of classroom assessment in teaching and learning. In V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 1066-1101). Washington: American Educational Research Association Taras, M. (2005). Assessment - summative and formative - some theoretical reflections. British Journal of Educational Studies, 53(4), 466-478. Vial, M. (2012). Se repérer dans les modèles de l'évaluation [Finding yourself in models of assessment]. Bruxelles: De Boeck.