The educational literature shows that formative assessment is highly conducive to learning. The tasks given to students in formative assessment generally require open-ended responses that can be given, for example, in essay-type format and that are assessed by a human marker. An essential component is the formative feedback provided by the marker that needs to assist the student in recognising ...

Much of the focus on learning technologies has been on structuring innovative learning experiences and on managing distance and hybrid learning environments. This article focuses on the use of technology as an important formative assessment and feedback tool. The rationale for this focus is based on prior research findings that suggest that timely and informative feedback promotes learning. The...

INTRODUCTION Recent changes in postgraduate medical training curricula usually encompass a shift towards more formative assessment, or assessment for learning. However, though theoretically well suited to postgraduate training, evidence is emerging that engaging in formative assessment in daily clinical practice is complex. AIM We aimed to explore trainees' and supervisors' perceptions of wha...

Within the educational community, there is an increasing recognition of the need for formative assessment tools. Effective formative assessment must meet four criteria: it must assess higher order knowledge, identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, provide effective feedback, and be easy to use. Although concept maps and other structural knowledge representation techniques have been used su...

Part of recent reforms of postgraduate medical training in the Netherlands is the introduction of formatively intended knowledge testing or progress testing. We previously evaluated the construct validity and reliability of postgraduate progress testing. However, when assessment is intended to be formative, the acceptability of the test (scores) and the educational impact that is achieved are a...

Nationwide health promotion campaigns are an important part of government-funded health promotion efforts. Valid evaluation is important, but difficult because gold standard research designs are not applicable and the allocation of budget and time for evaluation is often very tight. In The Netherlands, Health Promotion Institutes (HPIs) are responsible for these campaigns. We conducted an explo...

BACKGROUND Online formative assessment continues to be an important area of research and methods which actively engage the learner and provide useful learning outcomes are of particular interest. This study reports on the outcomes of a two year study of medical students using formative assessment tools. METHOD The study was conducted over two consecutive years using two different strategies f...

It has been more than 40 years since Blalock (1964) noted the distinction between what he called “cause” (formative) and “effect” (reflective) indicators of latent variables, and three decades since the academic literature recognized that some SEM measurement models don’t fit classical test theory’s assumptions about the direction of causality of the relationships between constructs and their i...

BACKGROUND Formative programme evaluations assess intervention implementation processes, and are seen widely as a way of unlocking the 'black box' of any programme in order to explore and understand why a programme functions as it does. However, few critical assessments of the methods used in such evaluations are available, and there are especially few that reflect on how well the evaluation ac...

INTRODUCTION Worldwide, children under the age of 5 years are at particular risk of drowning. Responding to this need requires the development of evidence-informed drowning prevention strategies. Historically, drowning prevention strategies have included denying access, learning survival skills and providing supervision, as well as education and information which includes the use of mass media....