Formative Learning Evaluation of university students as success factor

This paper deals with the impact of formative evaluation on the learning success of the university students. A lot of young people interrupt their academic career before the end of it or meet big delays and demotivation. That is due to many reasons; one of them is the lack of clear understanding of the expected outcomes. The aim of this paper is considering how a formative evaluation process with clear indicators for transversal skills together with consistent teaching forms may help students to reach the main aims of university studies. I’ll focus on competences as learning to learn, scientific and critical thinking, initiative and entrepreneurship, active citizenship, communication and social skills. Different ways of assessing lead to reach different aims. This contribution includes an ongoing study, describes data drawn from the use of a portfolio and from a qualitative questionnaire with closed and open questions for self assessment filled-in by the students of the subject area group “Citizenship Learning” at the University of Trento. Intermediate results highlight the importance of articulating learning goals explicitely for improvement of the students outcomes.