Faculty Members' Perception, Implementation, and Challenges of Formative Assessment in Undergraduate Medical Education: A Cross-Sectional Study

Medical curriculum reform requires quality assurance in all curricular activities including assessment. Such reform necessitates a shift of focus from summative assessment (SA) to formative assessment (FA). However, the implementation of FA confronts several challenges that hinder its proper application, especially with the increased number of students and the diversity of activities required from faculty members. Therefore, this study aims to explore the perception, implementation, and challenges facing faculty members during the application of FA to undergraduate medical students. This is a cross-sectional study using an online survey to collect data from the pre-clinical and clinical faculty members of the College of Medicine (CoM) at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU), Dammam, Saudi Arabia. The survey consisted of two sections. The first section focused on the demographic and academic-related data, while the second section consisted of a validated self-administered questionnaire related to FA. The questionnaire comprised six domains regarding the level of perception, implementation, and challenges facing FA applications. Among the 347 faculty members who received the research survey, 132 members participated in this study (38%). Regarding awareness, 68.9% and 67.4% of the faculty members were aware of two subdomains, namely, "functions of formative evaluation and understanding of its usefulness" and "sharing and addressing educational attention and success criteria." However, with respect to the application of FA, only one-third of the members implemented the FA into their teaching process. Regarding barriers to applying FA, the majority of the participants agreed on the major barriers, which included required activities from the instructors (93.2%), the number of students (87.1%), and students' engagement (84.1%). There is a fair overall awareness regarding the concept and importance of FA. Despite that, the application of such an assessment method was limited. This may be attributed to several challenges, including a large number of students and the required activities from the faculty. Further studies are recommended to investigate the implementation of an FA feedback system and its impact on the learning process in the CoM at IAU.