The hypothesis of formative causation predicts that as animals of a given species learn a new pattern of behaviour, other similar animals will subsequently tend to learn the same thing more readily all over the world, as a result of a process called morphic resonance. The more that learn it, the easier it should become for others. This possibility was tested with day- old chicks using a simple ...

Formative assessment is deemed the collaborative processes in which teachers and learners are engaged for the purpose of understanding the learners' learning and diagnosing their strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, teachers' beliefs about formative assessment are paramount and might be influenced by a legion of variables such age, educational background, instructional experience, and g...

BACKGROUND Graduate and post-graduate education for health professionals is increasingly delivered in an e-learning environment, where automated, continuous formative testing with integrated feedback can guide students' self-assessment and learning. Asking students to rate the certainty they assign to the correctness of their answers to test questions can potentially provide deeper insights int...

Introduction Online formative assessments (OFA's) have been increasingly recognised in medical education as resources that promote self-directed learning. Formative assessments are used to support the self-directed learning of students. Online formative assessments have been identified to be less time consuming with automated feedback. This pilot study aimed to determine whether participation a...

The use of computerized-adaptive testing (CAT) has expanded rapidly the last years mainly due to the advancements in communication and information technology. Availability of advanced mobile technologies provides several benefits to e-learning by creating an additional channel of access with mobile devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. This paper describes the design issues that were consider...

The use of web-based learning and assessment tools is growing in tertiary institutions around the world. To date, very few papers have reported the development and evaluation of a web-based formative assessment tool for postgraduate students. The aim of the present paper was to report on the development and evaluation of an online formative assessment tool for this student group. The web-based ...

This study sought to examine the relationship between the use of formative assessment strategies and the Iranian EFL teachers’ sense of self-efficacy. Moreover, this study investigated the relationships and interactions between the EFL teachers’ use of formative assessment strategies, their gender, level of experience, and sense of self-efficacy. This is a descriptive ex post facto design study...

Background: Testing and teaching are interrelated in education process; using various kinds of tests, teachers are able to anticipate the strong and weak points of learning in students, their progress and their accomplishment. The influence of test on teaching and learning is commonly referred to as washback. Testing washback is a twisted concept that becomes even more complex under a various i...