Formative Research & Summative Research

I never really listened carefully to the lessons before. Through presentations from other classes’ and my classmates and also conclusions from my teacher, I get a better understanding of formative research and summative research.

I have learned that formative research is an exploration of the community in which an agency is situated and it helps agencies understand the interests, attributes and needs of the community. It is used to gain insight into the subject the project deals with and helps in problem identification and solving. Formative research is essential in developing programs as well as improving existing and ongoing programs. It is an objective of doing research. One of the main advantages is developing knowledge. One of the disadvantages is it is time consuming because mostly processes are followed monthly, weekly or even daily basis. It can be in any forms of methods as long as they have goals. It is included service, focus group, interviews, observations, anything. It can be done at the beginning and throughout the process of the project. Formative research gives you questions such as what is the objective? What are the critical ideas and point you want to make sure you reach? What are the key areas that you want to develop? What kind of formative research that can help you with that? It gives clues to what to do next or what are the ways to continue. The question for formative research is, “This is my objective, what are the ways?”.

The another one is summative research. It is done at the end of the project to determine the success of a particular program or activity, framing the outcome of the investigative process. One of the main advantages is it is a simplified information that is understandable for a mass audience. One of the disadvantages is it is not accurate which the mass audience will not be able to get every details of research conducted. It is not product oriented but it is more to concerning how people receive the product. The example is if I do a graduation project’s summative research, I will ask questions such as how many people go there? How many people read my creative process journal? What type of questions do the audience asks? The question for summative research is, “This is my objective, did I achieve the objective?”.

In my graduation project, I would like to do formative research. In a mean time, I am interested in doing the rethink of the future of the education topic. I would research on how the education is right now and how people feel about it. Is it good enough? Is it boring or even bad? Interviewing some people could give some ideas. But before that, I would ask myself about how I feel of nowadays’ education. I would make a mind map to solve how I think about education. Right now, I am still researching on the website. I read articles on education such as the stage of education today. I am not sure if I would do summative research for my graduation project. If I have enough time, I will do it. It is useful to see if my graduation project is a success to the public or it is only a so-so project. It could be a report that I could put it in my portfolio later. Summative research could give me a time to think and a self reflection after the project. It could be an example guidance for my next project so I could avoid some common mistakes. Both research are useful to me but I prefer to do formative research right now.