Faculty Members’ Perception, Implementation, and Challenges of Formative Assessment in Undergraduate Medical Education: A cross-sectional study

Abstract Background 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. Methods 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). The survey consisted of 2 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 formative assessment. The questionnaire comprised six domains regarding the level of perception, implementation, and challenges facing FA applications. Results 132 out of 347 faculty members (38%) responded to the survey. Regarding awareness, 68.9% and 67.4% of the faculty members respectively were aware of two subdomains namely, ‘Functions of formative evaluation and understanding of its usefulness and ‘Sharing and addressing educational attentions and success criteria’. However, with respect to the application of FA, only one-third of the members (33.3%) implemented the FA into their teaching process. Regarding barriers to apply 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 the students’ engagement (84.1%). Conclusions 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 attribute 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 a formative assessment feedback system and its impact on the learning process in the CoM at IAU.