Changes Formative Assessments for Programming Units
Meena Jha, Smitha Shivshankar, Sweta Thakur, Sanjay Kumar Jha · Universal Journal of Educational Research · 2023
Assessment is vital to the education process. However, concerns exist regarding assessment types and how they can be helpful in students' learning. Summative assessments are used as a measure to evaluate what students have learned at the end of the unit. The time invested in providing feedback on summative assessments does not help much to improve students' learning. Receiving ongoing feedback is known to be very helpful and beneficial for students' learning. Summative assessments are specifically amalgamated into the unit design as they are graded and are used to measure the success of students in the unit; however, the status of how universities are using formative assessments to support students' learning and if they are specifically assimilated into a unit design is still not very clear. Academics choose to provide feedback to students in different ways; however, it is also important that students get systematic feedback in the form of formative assessments that will help enhance their learning. As learning programming is considered one of the challenging units for students, this paper explores how Australian universities have assimilated formative assessments in the design of programming units at the undergraduate level. This will lay the groundwork for making formative evaluation necessary, so that they can be clearly incorporated in the unit outline, establishing a positive culture of continual feedback and learning.