Formative Evaluation

What's a formative evaluation? Basically, when a instructional project is still in the design stage you seek out key individuals to provide you feedback on your design ideas. "Formative" refers to the beginning, like formative years of childhood. In designing a instructional product, the formative evaluator can can include people such as the subject matter experts or others knowledgeable about the topic, but most importantly, they should also include people who are going to be your target audience. That way, you are comparing carrots to carrots and not apples to oranges, like SMEs to a general learner.

In designing educational websites, formative evaluations take on a different form, no pun intended. To get week four's topic going, Dave Young asked us what was 'pining around in our heads' about our EdWeb. Many people reverted to their navigation. I guess I was a little behind the curve because I was more worried about how I was going to my project out to my intended audience, how was I going to sell my project to an organization so they thought it was going to benefit them.

My best contribution was "After listening to Dr. Tessmer's interview, I thought how much our EdWeb's are like a living document that under goes intensive editing. I wrote an honor's thesis in college, but the web project has many more considerations: navigability, writing for web readers, releasing to hundreds of learners at one time. One needs to pay strict attention to detail, understand web-authoring tools, and now solicit people for formative evaluations!"

Dave liked the idea of a living document, "Lots of great insights in what you wrote, Kerry! I particularly like the phrase "living document." Questions are going to crop up constantly that will need to be answered and if your approach is to be nimble and use formative evaluation effectively to answer those questions, you'll do well."

I learned much from the formative evaluation process. Life knowing which people to solicit and getting people to actually get hands-on practice before building the website.

Looking back at that conversation, I think this blog posting is like a summative evaluation of my formative evaluation.