The relationship between ICT based formative assessment and academic achievement in a mechanics of materials course

Formative assessment can be understood as assessment for learning rather than of learning. Research has demonstrated that formative assessment/feedback is strongly and causally related to students' achievement in higher education. At Avans University of Applied Sciences, the first-year course Mechanics of Materials 2 (MoM2) does not contain formative assessment due to constrained personnel and financial resources. In this study, we introduced formative assessment in the MoM2 course using an innovative ICT tool. This tool provides students with personalized feedback on both task and process level to improve their learning and to enhance adaptive teacher class instruction. To assess the impact of the ICT based formative assessment, we obtained the final course exam pass rate, the average grade and student satisfaction on the 2018-2019 course MoM2. We compared these outcomes to those in the previous 3 runs of this course (2017-2018, 2016-2017, 2015-2016). These courses were identical to the most recent version of MoM2 but they did not include ICT based formative assessment. In addition, we compared the 2018-2019 run of MoM2 with the 2018-2019 run of Mechanics of Materials 1 (MoM1), which is a highly similar course, which does contain a form of non-ICT based formative assessment. The results show that the use of ICT based formative assessment did not improve academic achievement in the course MoM2 2018/2019 compared with previous runs of the same course and did not improve academic achievement compared to the similar course MoM1 2018/2019.