How Formative and Summative evaluation helped

I remember the initial phase of my project. My team was all set to roll out the development plan for creating content for school children on basic IT topics.

The content overview was ready and the audience age level mapped (on papers from earlier experience) and the table of contents prepared for the entire book. I so struck me that we were working with a set of audience who are a cent different from those we have already worked with.

I insisted on preparing sample chapters and conducting a formative evaluation to verify my assessment of the audience. It worked! Well, it didn't. Both ways. My formative evaluation really paid off, giving us the true picture of the field. It worked. The stance we had taken on the choice of language (reading level) was not matching the actual reading level of the audience, our reading level didn't work. We woke up.

Field study at formative level is very important. I would've learnt in theory that formative evaluation is necessary to build confidence in yourself, while testing the concept's workability and suitability in the field. But, applying the same in real life meant great revelation in the field of instruction design to me.

Of course summative evaluation was done at the end of the product dev cycle. The reports signaled a successful product and we were able to market it.

Summary: Formative evaluation as important as summative evaluation.