2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background: In teaching and learning, assessment plays a crucial role for both educators and students. It serves as a fundamental tool used to provide learners with essential feedback for adapting and enhancing their ongoing learning processes. Simultaneously, it enables instructors to make necessary adjustments in their teaching methods to align with their predefined educational objectives. Formative assessment is a term that describes the regular assessment of students' progress and comprehension. Its purpose is to identify the specific needs of students and make adjustments in teaching methods accordingly. In essence, formative assessment is designed to offer feedback that enhances the learning experience, while summative assessment is primarily focused on measuring the extent of learning achieved. In this study, we aim to examine the effects of formative assessment practices on students’ attitude toward learning, expected grade achievement and design skills from three design-based courses offered at different levels of the electrical engineering curriculum.

Methodology: The study involved participants who were students enrolled in various levels of Electrical and Computer Engineering courses: junior level (Electronics, and Computer Architecture and Design), and senior level (Medical Instrumentation: Application and Design). Each of these courses spanned a duration of 14 weeks and was divided into four to five distinct modules, with each module taking 2-4 weeks to complete. Notably, nearly half of these modules underwent weekly formative assessment practices. Following the completion of each module, students were requested to complete self-assessed learning skill assessments, some observation forms, and participated in several semi-structured interviews. In the context of this study, the responses obtained from students in modules that did not include formative assessments were used as a point of reference, akin to responses from a control group.

Results and Conclusions: Preliminary analysis of data from modules incorporating formative assessments, as opposed to those without them, reveals favorable outcomes associated with the utilization of formative assessments in terms of students' learning, expected academic performance, and design skills. It's worth noting that students exhibit a preference for specific formative assessment methods in distinct modules. This variation underscores the importance of tailoring the choice of formative assessments to the specific course content. Formative assessments offer educators the valuable ability to deliver continuous feedback to their students. This engagement makes students an integral part of the learning process and enhances their self-assessment skills, ultimately aiding in their comprehension of their own cognitive processes. As a result, we strongly encourage instructors to incorporate formative assessments into their teaching methodologies to assist students in honing their skills in the realm of electrical engineering system design.