FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT IN TUTORIAL SESSIONS: AN ANALYSIS BASED ON EMOTIONAL DIDACTICAL SUITABILITY^{1 2}

ABSTRACT:

Formative assessment consists of a qualitative evaluation of an individual's knowledge, abilities, and competencies during a formative process. This assessment is fundamental to developing tutorial sessions in the problem-based learning methodology, which is widely used in Brazilian Medical undergraduate degrees. However, factors such as teachers' lack of knowledge and students' fear of the assessment process hinder its effectiveness. Therefore, this study analyzes how formative assessment takes place in tutorial sessions based on Emotional Didactical Suitability; that is, it intends to understand how formative assessment affects the interests, attitudes, emotions, and learning/knowledge of the students participating in the tutorial session. The informants of this qualitative research are students and a tutor of a Medicine degree at a School in the countryside of Bahia, Brazil. Data was collected through Participant Observation using structured questionnaires and the observation of the tutorial dynamic in 2021. Data analysis was conducted through the Emotional Didactic Suitability Criteria, adapted for the Medicine course, which aimed to measure how students are interested and affected in the learning-teaching process. The results point out that students and teachers still value more the summative assessment at the expense of the formative one, creating adverse behaviors toward the assessment process, such as anxiety and fear. The research also shows the importance of an assessment at the end of the tutoring to stimulate the development of abilities, attitudes, and the learning of studied content. Nevertheless, it does not follow the conventional standardization of self-evaluation, peer evaluation, tutor evaluation, and evaluation through the tutor.

Keywords:
feedback; problem-based learning; criteria of didactical suitability; autonomy; emotions