Implementation of formative assessment and its effectiveness in undergraduate medical education: an experience at a Caribbean Medical School.

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Background: Two types of assessments used in the medical education are summative and formative assessments. Summative assessments evaluate a student's learning progress and typically provide concrete grades or pass/fail decisions. The main purpose of the formative assessments is to provide the feedback and improve the learning behavior of the students. However, it is less known about the impact of the formative assessments on overall student's performance in summative assessments. This study is intended to study the effects after the implementation of formal formative assessments on students overall performance in summative assessments or any changes in the total grade point average in a Caribbean Medical School which is a low resource context.

Materials And Methods: A longitudinal cohort study was conducted among the basic sciences students at AUSOM in May 2017. The study was supported by quantitative data, quantitative and qualitative questionnaires to address the objectives of the study. Data collected and analyzed with Stata (Stata 15).

Results: 58, among 67 total students took part in the study. The mean grade point average (GPA) with and without formative assessment was 2.83 (SD±.624745) and 2.29 (SD±.76575) respectively. There was a significant improvement in the overall GPA after the introduction of the formative assessments t (58) = 0.000567, p < .001.

Conclusion: There was a significant improvement in the student's academic performance after the implementation of formative assessments. Formative assessments consolidate the learning and reinforce the learning behavior. It is necessary that formative assessments should be incorporated into the regular assessment system for the optimal educational output.