Assessment

Formative assessment activities are those that provide feedback during the learning process. They help faculty understand how students learn, which can help them modify teaching and mentoring to better facilitate learning. They can also help students understand how they learn, creating opportunities for improved metacognition. Beyond student learning in undergraduate research, it is critical to the quality of the research itself that students and faculty understand how all participants are grappling with research challenges.

Formative assessment can take many forms. The feedback provided to students can be formal or informal, and it can come from the instructor, the student or one of more of the student’s peers. Here are some examples:

• A student can share drafts or parts of a research proposal or research paper with an instructor for feedback prior to submitting a final paper. The draft can be returned graded and with comments, or the instructor can provide oral or written comments without assigning a grade. Another possibility is to allow students to workshop drafts with one another.
• A student can maintain a reflection journal or a blog to processes thoughts on research and the learning experience. The instructor can assign topics for any or all of these entries. These informal writing exercises can give the faculty member insight into the student's perceptions of the experience and can help students track their own growth in understanding the project and the research process.

Summative assessment activities evaluate learning and product quality at the end of a learning experience. The end of the learning experience doesn't have to be the end of a semester or the end of a research project. Summative assessments can be conducted at the conclusion of some or all of the stages of the research process. Here are some examples:

• A student can write a research proposal in order to demonstrate understanding of goals, significance and proposed methodology of a project before implementing that methodology. This can be one graded assignment and can be followed by another, like the final paper or a presentation to peers, faculty and interested parties.
• A research project can be broken down into short-step assignments, each tied to a stage of the research process. For instance, to assess student understanding of data collection, students can construct and describe the dataset they will use in the project, defining variables and showing and discussing summary statistics. This can be graded prior to advancing to the next stage of the research process.