EDIT 451 Post 1 -Formative & Summative evaluation

Designers, observers or decision makers can improve their process by using formative evaluation. Implementing Formative evaluation provides the evaluation of the process. Therefore, the formative evaluation can be carried out when designers or decision makers are planning the whole design. Formative evaluation is more like evaluating while doing it. On contrary, summative evaluation is like a final evaluation that you can observe if there is any specific results. Summative evaluations will be implemented in the end of a project, a design or a products.

To be honest, years ago, when I was still a teacher, I didn't really use any evaluation to evaluate my lesson or my students. What I have been doing was to give tests to students. And the tests result are my consequences for evaluating if my contents/lessons are suitable for my students or not. After I started the program, I realized that evaluation has been a part which I always ignored but indeed it is important.

According to the textbook, it mentions most of the industries tended to continue to rely on learners responses to postinstrucion attitude questionnaires(summative evaluation). By my first job experience in USA, I observed the situation that we have in our department. After every computer training workshop, we will encourage our participants to do an online evaluation for the workshop that they take. The questionnaire is here http://www.calstatela.edu/its/training/sstp/

The department believes that this after-workshop evaluation can help them to improve their workshop. But in my opinion, this evaluation results don't actually provide meaningful information. Because this evaluation indeed is not well designed, the supervisor actually can't really know what we can improve or what we can do more. For example, we have a lot of students response that they feel they do learn something, but after the class, they usually forgot what they learned in the previous weeks. I think that is because the workshop tempo is fast, and in the end it doesn't provide enough practice for students to review again. So if they use formative evaluation while they design the workshops, they may revise their design process a little bit to make their workshop design meet the participants' expectation.

In summary, as the textbook mentions, industries still prefer using the summative evaluation which is a good method to observe the conclusion and continue further revision. However, formative evaluation provides us more information while we are in process. Doing by revising would make our designs more accurate to meet our goals.