Applying Seamless Formative Assessment in Health Professional Education

• In Event: Opportunities for Formative Assessment Across Health Professions Education Settings

Abstract

Summative assessment reigns in higher education, and this is so for health professional education (Downing & Yudkowsky, 2009). In fact, teaching students in health professional education has been largely didactic with observable outcomes that can be measured (Getz, Kirkengen, & Hetlevik, 2008; Smith, 2011), lending itself to mostly summative assessment. However, Shepard (2006) emphasized that “formative assessment, effectively implemented, can do as much or more to improve student achievement than any of the most powerful instructional interventions” (p. 627). Further, formative assessment has been shown to improve student achievement (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Brookhart, 2007), and feedback to students about their learning and understanding is a vital part of the formative assessment process (Black & Wiliam, 2009; Popham, 2008).

In particular, formative feedback gives students the “information they need so they can understand where they are in their learning and what to do next” (Brookhart, 2008, p. 2). It is further argued that giving students feedback with no opportunity to use it does not result in improved learning and is not considered formative feedback (Brookhart, 2008; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Ruiz-Primo & Li, 2013; Wiliam, 2011).

In this paper, we present several practical examples of how formative assessment/feedback has been effectively used to improve student learning in pharmacy education. One example is summarized here.

First year pharmacy students in a course on social and ethical behaviours were given a ten week assignment that had five bi-weekly tasks. For example, for the first two weeks they had to observe positive ethical and social behaviours of others, in the workplace, classroom, or social situations. They had to draw, code their drawings, and write 1-2 pages about how or why their representations affected their personal and/or professional lives. For the next two weeks they did the same activity for negative behaviours. For the third bi-weekly task they had to visualize and write about their own positive behaviours, for the fourth their negative behaviours, and finally they wrote and drew about their learnings from the project.
Summatively, the assignment was worth 30%. However, the learning was in the formative processes. No grades were provided for the first two weeks, but students were given two types of feedback. First, individual written feedback on their work was provided. They were also given whole class explicit instruction after each two week segment to move their learning forward. Student examples of work (with permission and anonymously) were used to engage the students in how to improve their critical and creative thinking. Starting with the third task, students were given grades for each task, along with individual and whole class feedback. Details are in the full paper, along with more specific assessment activities that were used formatively to provide instructional tasks that were seamless with assessment. Effective assessment for deep understanding necessitates “opportunities for frequent teacher-student interaction” (McMillan, 2010, p. 46) and an “implicit or explicit recipe for future action” (Wiliam & Leahy, 2007). This thinking underpins the formative assessment approach that was used in this course.

Authors

• Beverly Ann Fitzpatrick, Memorial University

• Sarah Anne Marrs, Virginia Commonwealth University