STUDENT’S RESPONSE TO FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES

Assessment processes have been traditionally understood as the final step of the learning process by both, students and teachers. That means that, generally, no information is received by the student about its learning but a mark, usually with difficult interpretation. By the contrary, if direct information about weakness and strengths of their work is presented to the students, together with the corresponding mark, the assessment becomes a part of the learning process, helping the student to improve its work in the future. In the framework of the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE) and in order to make easier for the student the learning process, the application of techniques such as the formative assessment is crucial. In this sense, the subject of 3rd year of the Agricultural Engineering Degree “Technology of Animal Production” includes a practical work in which traditionally, the students did not receive any information but the mark after presenting each report. During two consecutive years, an evaluation process with feed-back has been implemented in some of the practical seasons. The aim of this work is to present the results of the application of this technique in various aspects: students’ results and participation and teachers’ overview. The experience was conducted in the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV) (Valencia, Spain) during 2009 and 2010 in three of the nine practical seasons of the subject. The Sakai virtual platform of the UPV Poliformat, was used in order to promote the bi-directional documents and comments exchange between students and teachers. The students were called to upload to the platform a report after the session. This report was corrected and commented. The corrected report with its corresponding mark was uploaded to the platform by the teacher. The students had the opportunity of revising the work attending to the teacher’s comments and upload it again to improve the mark. Regarding to the results of the experience, if comparing with previous years results, an improvement of the students’ results was observed attending to the marks obtained. Higher participation rates were also observed; almost 100% of the students who attended to the sessions presented the reports on time. The amount of students who corrected and re-send the reports was strongly correlated to the initial mark obtained, finding higher rates of answer for these students with marks below 5 (pass) and close to 10 (excellent). This system improved both results and communication processes among students and teachers. It can be concluded that the methodology described in this work improved the learning of the students.