Is Current Formative Assessment Still Relevant in Turning Students into Deep Learners?

Abstract

Universities should design the assessment activities that could induce students to be deep learners instead of surface learners, and at the same time equip them with relevant soft skills. This paper aims to gain insight on students’ perception on the appropriateness of the assessment activities in developing soft skills of a management accounting subject at a public university in Malaysia. 420 usable questionnaires were collected out of 686 distributed to fourth semester students taking the said subject. Descriptive statistics and Mann-Whitney U test were conducted to achieve the objective. Results revealed that students did not benefit much from test or quiz implying that such assessment does not turn students into deep learners as expected. On the other hand, group work and presentation do contribute to the development of soft skills. However, findings should not be generalized to other subjects.