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Leveraging the Force of Formative Assessment & Feedback for Effective Engineering Education

In recent years, there has been a fundamental shift in engineering education from an emphasis on covering content to a student-centric focus on ensuring the attainment of learning outcomes. To ensure attainment of the educational objectives, engineering education thought leaders have highlighted the importance of the development of effective authentic assessment schemes appropriate for the 21st century, and the alignment of assessment and instructional efforts with the planned learning objectives and outcomes. Our focus in this paper is on the use of formative assessment (also called assessment for learning) for engineering education. With formative assessment, an assessment is made of the current learning level and then pertinent feedback is provided to both the student and the instructor so that they can take concrete steps to facilitate learning improvement. This is in contrast with the ubiquitous summative feedback (assessment “of” learning)—in which the main aim is to grade or rank the student by ascertaining their current learning level without really giving them concrete advice on what to do next to improve learning performance. The use of formative assessment can transform students’ performance by empowering them with particularly potent “self-assessment” skills through which students become more aware of their learning and know what is it that they should do next (i.e., they become “self- directed”). Formative assessment is equally useful for the teaching staff—by helping them know their impact and tailor the instructional strategy and try to personalize their pedagogy to the individual needs of the students. The main contribution of our paper is that we present an easy-to-understand synthesis of the rich literature on formative assessment and effective feedback. Although there are numerous published books and plenty of research papers in this space, our paper fills the niche of providing in a single paper the main findings and insights of the discipline that can guide engineering educators who want to learn about the best practices in formative assessment.