Educational+Design

=__Educational design__=

Design research should be applied to educational process because it produce innovations to the purposes and help sustain development. A lot of times, we learn through existing data because it is cost and time effective process. For designing a process, summative and formative evaluations can be done.

Formative Evaluation
Formative Evaluation is the process in which assessment is taken place while the program or object is still being developed. While producing an object or program, we can always self assess or do many revisions on our own. But in many occasions, there are still things we missed or forgot to include. An outsider will be able to evaluate and point out these hidden flaws. By using formative evaluation repeatedly, one can evaluate internally by oneself or with the group of producers and externally by outsiders or getting specialist’s opinions. It can help bring the process or object more complete and closer to perfection.

**Summative Evaluation**
Summative Evaluation is usually done within a small group of people. A pre-run of the process or object to test trial then collect the results. The assessments of the results are crucial for development because it reflects on what information users received from the program or object

Putting formative evaluation into real life example would be a training program for sports. A coach would train his players regularly. During training, he would assess individual player’s skills and note the strength and weakness of each player. A good coach would then point out the weaknesses and train his player. The player would then eventually become better all rounded with specialization on focused skills.

Summative Evaluation would be like tests and exams in schools. It looks at more than one learner’s performance to see what the group of people learned from the learning materials. Instructors would sometimes utilize specific tasks, i.e. projects and assignments to determine the level of understanding as well.

For designing an object, formative evaluation will be an essential process to improve the designs and functionality of the object. After the development stage, a prototype should be built and test trial. A summative evaluation is then required on the prototype and the data collected from the evaluation can indicate the understanding of the design and effectiveness of delivery.

Many introductory courses in undergraduate programs, in which a professor gives lecture to a large number of students, are not very interactive. Students normally don’t receive formative feedback. Some courses conduct many in-class quizzes. Such in-class quizzes can be seen as formative feedback, since it can help students’ self-assessment and preparation for the next exam; however, in many cases those quizzes seem to be just a part of summative evaluation. Quizzes and tests using multiple choices mostly just to inform the score, which tells students how well they did in the quiz/test, but it doesn’t tell what to be improved.

Formative feedback is not provided systematically in most of university courses. Among the courses I have ever taken, only CCT100/101 and HSC402 are the courses, which have online quizzes for self-assessment.

Technically all university courses can include some sort of formative evaluation system however; it is difficult to reflect the results of formative evaluation to the teaching in the class, since learning varies widely from students to students. It is limitation of education in one-to-many teaching circumstance. From this aspect, electronic learning environment has more potential, since if the system is sophisticated enough, it is not only able to give formative feedbacks but also automatically rearrange such as sequence of learning objects according to the needs of each student. A summative evaluation is then taken place to determine what values have been generated through the learning materials. One can say this is “taking the easier way out” but in truth, it is limiting the potential growth and, there is a strong chance for a positive educational reform.