Abstract:

Students entering higher education institutions during the educational process show different levels of commitment, skill and interest in the content presented. Formative assessment can be used as an instructional strategy to increase and maintain these levels. Assessment is defined as a formal and informal process that teachers and students use in order to gather evidence to guide the next stages of learning. In addition, it is important to note that learning is personal, and whether the student makes the decision to learn or not, the assessment can be used as an instrument to engage him into the learning and teaching process. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to improve the performance of students who are taking the subject of Static offered by an Ecuadorian public university using the formative assessment. Formative assessment is defined as an active and intentional learning process that links teachers and students to the purpose of continuously and systematically gathering evidence of learning in order to improve student performance. This definition indicates that it is used by the teacher to improve her teaching. It is also used by the student to improve his performance during the learning of a subject. In addition, the key point in this type of assessment is feedback in which the student is communicated descriptively the results of their performance so that they make the decision to make a change in their learning. The latter denotes the interactive nature of formative evaluation. The following types of short tests were used to test students: Reading tests, individual quiz with and without resources, and collaborative test with and without resources. The end-of-unit test used was a summative evaluation. The participants were 68 students, 52 men and 16 women, aged between 18 and 20, who took the subject of Static offered to students who follow the civil engineering career of an Ecuadorian public university. The instructional unity was "Moment of a Force". The time spent teaching lasted eight hours. The instruments were a set of tests of different formats. A posttest related to the unit taught.

The procedure followed in this study was as follows:
(1) Explain the study unit using the instructional strategy of Robert Gagné to both groups.
(2) Apply the reading test to each group in each class and during classes to apply quizzes with and without resources and collaborative quizzes with and without resources only to the experimental group.
(3) Finally, administered the posttest. The study consisted of two groups with posttest. The design is (X·O1)/O2, where O1 represents the posttest scores of the experimental group and O2 represents the posttest scores of the control group; X represents intervention, which is the application of the formative evaluation.

The statistical analysis applied was the Gosset test with a significance level of p<0.05. The Gosset test gave a value t = 2,854, df = 63.16, and p = 0.00582. Therefore, the null hypothesis is rejected, and the research hypothesis is accepted. The results show that the formative evaluation, an instructional strategy of active learning improves the students' performance.

Keywords:

Formative assessment, Summative assessment, Quiz, Learning, Static.