Towards Paradigm Change of Formative Assessment in the Undergraduate Curriculum: The Participatory Action Research (PAR)

The concept of “assessment for learning” has been widely defined as a form of assessment that facilitates the improvement of students’ learning. However, there’s still limited evidence of real implementation of formative assessment, especially related to the sociocultural issues. This study explored the formative paradigm change in students and lecturers in our context. A participatory action research approach was used in two groups of the undergraduate medical teachers (N=18), and students (N=30). This research contains two cyclical processes of reflection for over 4 months. In between the cycle, we have workshops and continuing discussions about formative assessment. The FGD and in-depth interviews were done to explore the gap between the cycle qualitatively. The results showed the gaps and challenges in changing the paradigm. We identified three themes of paradigm changes : (1) “Formative is the assessment of knowledge” to “the assessment of thinking skills and professionalism”; (2) Feedback “derived in group and one direction explanation” to “individually driven and a dialogic form”; (3) Formative assessment result is “score-minded” to “the improvement of thinking skills and process-minded”. Besides, we found the themes of challenges in these paradigm changes, such as (1) the good practice in “how to” assess and feedback dialog in cultural context; (2) students’ self-reflection skills ; (3) student and teachers’ collaboration. We conclude that there is no simple way to implement the new paradigm of assessment, especially related to the cultural adaptation. We recommend this participatory approach to be a crucial part in the assessment paradigm changes.