Formative Evaluation

Formative Evaluation is one of the most important parts of the ID process. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you do nothing else from the ID process in your teaching at all, you should at least try out the materials and plans you make systematically with learners from the right audience. This will help you improve your instruction and teaching no matter what else you do.

There are a couple of key points to keep in mind while doing that, of course. First of all, it is hard to be entirely objective about our own performance, so making the procedures as systematic and objective as you can is important. Second, our own subjective impressions may be important and useful, but they are no substitute for actual data. Similarly, it can often be important to know whether students liked the instruction, but that may have little or no relationship to whether they learned from it.

Formative evaluation procedures, like those outlined in this course, are designed to overcome some of these problems. You should try to use them whenever possible.