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Category: Project

Description: The present study will be conducted in the first-year undergraduate course “materials science 1”, which is part of the mechanical engineering program at Avans University of Applied Sciences. All students from the cohort 2017-2018 will take part in the field experiment, and each of them will take three cumulative assessments before the final course exam. For a random half of the students, the performance on these cumulative assessments will add to the final course exam grade, i.e., the summative cumulative assessment condition, whereas for the other half of the students the performance will not add to the final course grade, i.e., the formative cumulative assessment condition. All participants will be tested immediately after the course, i.e., the final course exam, and after a 10-week delay prior to the start of “materials science 2”, which follows up on “materials science 1”. We decided to include a delayed test as Kerdijk and colleagues (2015) suggest that the effect of summative cumulative assessment may only lead to better achievement in the long term. The treatment effect, which is defined as the mean performance difference between the summative cumulative assessment condition and the formative cumulative assessment condition is the primary outcome in the present field experiment and we will examine the treatment effect at the two already mentioned retention intervals. Furthermore, the nature of the cumulative assessment (formative vs. summative assessment) may influence study effort, self-efficacy and perceived competence. Therefore, as a secondary outcome, we will compare the two conditions on these measures.