Total Assessment Tool/Package to Measure

¶ … total assessment tool/package to measure the development of students' critical thinking skills throughout a nursing program and upon graduation. Which type of evaluation is more important to curriculum development -- formative evaluation that measures processes and progress along the way, or summative evaluation that measures outcomes and the final end product? Explain your rationale.

On the one hand, formative evaluation provides periodic performance feedback that might be useful in fine-tuning the curricular offerings to make the program more effective. After all, adult learners improve their critical thinking skills as each curricular offering is completed, and these skills help improve their performance on subsequent offerings. On the other hand, though, these same factors mean that formative evaluation precludes developing an objective summative evaluation that accurately measures the effectiveness of the final end product because it has been altered. For a growing number of educators, it is becoming axiomatic that if students are not learning the way they are being taught, they need to be taught the way they learn. Therefore, because resources are by definition scarce, it just makes good business and pedagogical sense to use formative evaluation to help identify the teaching approaches and curricular offerings that are most effective for a given program of instruction (Krein & Weldon, 1999). For example, Graf (2004) advises that, "In a course development environment, a formative evaluation scheme might involve asking a representative sample of learners a series of questions about a module in a course" (p. 39). Furthermore, well-designed formative evaluations highlight specific content area for evaluation in ways that can help identify opportunities for improvement. In this regard, Graf adds that, "The questions are generally very specific and are directly related to the content of the module being evaluated. Once a course is developed, formative evaluation is often used in an ongoing manner, to diagnose problems and inform curricular redesign" (2004, p. 39).