The Big World of Formative Evaluation

Week 4’s interview with Dr. Marty Tessmer and the discussion following it were very interesting to me. Patty Mills summed it up very appropriately by saying that had the discussion been a meal, she would have been stuffed. The topic seems huge, and there are many different ways to look at it. I have not had much formal work with formative evaluation and ended up learning a lot about it. Many questions came up during the discussion, many of them centering on the navigation aspect of our EdWeb projects. I started off with a post referring to what Dr. Tessmer had talked about during the interview dealing with navigation and how I was questioning my own navigation system. I was relieved to find that other classmates were tackling the same issue still! I appreciated the responses to the post with suggestions on who I should have evaluate my prototype. At this point, that will include both teachers, elearning instructors at my school, and students who will represent the group of people actually using the finished product. Linda Guillory helped me realize that having the students evaluate is one of the most important parts of the formative evaluation and that I should try to use learners of different abilities. So maybe I ask an A student who picks up on things very fast and then have another student who tends to struggle and might not instinctively know to click a certain link to get to a certain piece of information.

I appreciated the post from Armi Trenas questioning what the basis is of saying a formative evaluation has been done effectively. I was actually wondering that myself. From what I gather, it is effective if I am able to find out what things do not work and change them so that they do. I am still trying to figure out how to come up with my formative evaluation plan and how to measure its effectiveness. I am wondering if doing a few evaluations, one initially and then one after the prototype has been revised, would be one way to see if the first was effective.

There is still a lot more to learn on formative evaluation, and I think it will continue to be an interesting topic moving forward with the EdWeb project.