Abstract:

The evaluation of learning within the European Higher Education Area is going to experience a number of significant changes derived from the need to consider new activities more oriented to students ongoing work and evaluation of students. This paper describes the experience concerning the development of a process of formative evaluation carried out by a group of lecturers belonging to the Business Management Department of the University of Alicante (Spain) who teach the subject ‘Strategic Management’. More specifically, this study has as its main aim to compare the results obtained by students assessed through a formative evaluation with respect to those choosing a traditional summative evaluation.
In summative evaluation, student marks are solely based on their taking a final exam. Instead, formative evaluation uses a tool known as ‘autonomous learning contract’ with which each student is offered a set of tasks to be performed during the academic year, which can be subject to evaluation. Students can freely choose the system by which they want to be evaluated.
The results show that the performance of students following a formative evaluation is significantly better than that of those opting for a summative evaluation. This study consequently makes an empirical contribution to the defense of the formative evaluation system in order to improve student performance within the framework of the European Higher Education Area.

Keywords:

formative evaluation, summative evaluation, European Higher Education Area.