This document discusses why TESTA (Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment) is important. It begins by noting that assessment and feedback are critical to student learning but there are challenges like an over-reliance on summative assessments and disconnected feedback. TESTA aims to address these issues by rebalancing assessments to include more formative work, creating better connections between assessments, and improving feedback practices. The document provides examples of successful formative assessment strategies used in different university programmes. Overall, TESTA seems to improve student perceptions of assessment and feedback as well as enhancing staff and student experiences of the curriculum.

1. Why do TESTA?
@solentlearning
@tansyjtweets
Tansy Jessop
University of Liverpool
13 September 2017

2. Your thoughts
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Type in three words or phrases to answer this
question:
What do you already know about TESTA?

3. What do you know about TESTA?

4. Your thoughts
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Type in three words or phrases to answer this
question:
What is the main assessment & feedback
challenges you face?

5. Challenges you face

7. Mixed methods approach
Programme
Team
Meeting
Assessment
Experience
Questionnaire
(AEQ)
TESTA
Programme
Audit
Student
Focus Groups

8. Sustained growth

9. TESTA….
“…is a way of thinking
about assessment and
feedback”
Graham Gibbs

10. So why do TESTA?

11. Because assessment & feedback
are at the heart of student learning
1) Assessment drives what students pay attention
to, and defines the actual curriculum (Ramsden
2003).
2) Feedback is the single most important factor in
learning (Hattie 2009; Black and Wiliam 1998).

12. Because there is a problem

13. The modular degree

14. IKEA 101: great for flat-pack furniture but…

15. Because TESTA seems to improve
students’ perceptions of A&F…
60%
65%
70%
75%
80%
85%
90%
95%
Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 OS
AVERAGENSSSCORES
COMPARISON OF 32 PROGS IN 13 UNIVERSITIES WITH SECTOR SCORES
NSS 2015 SCORES TESTA SCORES

16. …and improves the staff experience
• Reduce summative assessments
(eg. From 48-24)
• More challenging and interesting
summative tasks
• More engaging sessions with
students participating in formative
• Better connections across the
curriculum
• Less content-driven curriculum,
and more process-oriented

17. TESTA: evidence to action
1. High summative and low formative diets
2. Disconnected feedback
3. Confusion about goals and standards

18. 1. High summative: low formative
• High summative on UK, Irish, NZ and Indian degrees
• Summative a ‘pedagogy of control’
• Low formative: ratio of 1:8 formative to summative
• Weakly practised and understood

19. Assessment Arms Race

20. Your experience
Which of these
quotations resonates,
and why?
Any ideas to address the
problem?

21. What students say about high summative
• A lot of people don’t do wider reading. You just focus
on your essay question.
• In Weeks 9 to 12 there is hardly anyone in our
lectures. I'd rather use those two hours of lectures to
get the assignment done.
• It’s been non-stop assignments, and I’m now free of
assignments until the exams – I’ve had to rush every
piece of work I’ve done.

22. What students say about formative…
• It was really useful. We were assessed on it but we
weren’t officially given a grade, but they did give us
feedback on how we did.
• It didn’t actually count so that helped quite a lot
because it was just a practice and didn’t really
matter what we did and we could learn from
mistakes so that was quite useful.

23. But…
• If there weren’t loads of other assessments, I’d do it.
• If there are no actual consequences of not doing it,
most students are going to sit in the bar.
• It’s good to know you’re being graded because you
take it more seriously.
• The lecturers do formative assessment but we don’t
get any feedback on it.

24. 1) Low-risk opportunities for students to learn from
feedback (Sadler, 1989)
2) Helps students to fine-tune and understand
requirements and standards (Boud 2000, Nicol, 2006)
3) Feedback to lecturers from formative tasks helps to
adapt teaching (Hattie, 2009)
4) Engages students in cycles of reflection and
collaboration (Biggs 2003; Nicol & McFarlane Dick 2006)
5) Encourages and distributes student effort (Gibbs 2004).
Yet formative is the ‘silver bullet’

25. With the potential to deepen learning…

26. So, how do we do formative?
Three case studies of
successful formative
What made them
work?

27. Case Study 1: Business School
• Reduction from average 2 x summative, zero
formative per module
• …to 1 x summative and 3 x formative
• Required by students in entire business school
• All working to similar script
• Systematic shift, experimentation, less risky
together

28. Case Study 2: Social Sciences
• Problem: silent seminar, students not reading
• Public platform blogging
• Current academic texts
• In-class
• Threads and live discussion
• Linked to summative

29. Case study 3: Film and TV
• Seminar
• Problem: lack of discrimination about sources
• Students bring 1 x book, 1 x chapter, 1 x
journal article, 2 x pop culture articles
• Justify choices to group
• Reach consensus about five best sources

30. How to encourage formative assessment
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Choose the three which you think work best

31. Graduate Interns responses

32. 2. Disconnected feedback

33. It was heavy, tons of marking for
the tutor. It was such hard work.
It was criminal.
Media Course Leader
I’m really bad at reading
feedback. I’ll look at the mark
and then be like ‘well stuff it, I
can’t do anything about it’
Student, TESTA focus group
Lose-lose situation

34. What students say…
It’s difficult because your assignments are so detached
from the next one you do for that subject. They don’t
relate to each other.
Because it’s at the end of the module, it doesn’t feed into
our future work.
Because they have to mark so many that our essay
becomes lost in the sea that they have to mark.
It was like ‘Who’s Holly?’ It’s that relationship where
you’re just a student.

35. Feedback as Dialogue?

36. • Conversation: who starts the dialogue?
• Cycles of reflection across modules
• Giving feedback to feedforward to next task
• Quick generic feedback
• Feedback synthesis tasks
• Peer feedback (especially on formative)
• Technology: audio, screencast and blogging
• From feedback as ‘telling’…
• … to feedback as asking questions
Strategies taken by TESTA programmes

37. The TESTA Effect
• Rebalancing formative and summative
• Greater connections across modules
• Better sequencing and progression of
assessment across the programme
• New approaches to formative, including more
authentic assessment
• Revives and refreshes curriculum design
• Improved student learning and NSS scores.

38. From this educational paradigm…

39. Transmission Model

40. Social Constructivist Model

41. Learning-oriented summative
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVFwQzlVFy0

42. References
Blaich, C., & Wise, K. (2011). From Gathering to Using Assessment Results: Lessons from the Wabash
National Study. Occasional Paper #8. University of Illinois: National Institution for Learning Outcomes
Assessment.
Boud, D. and Molloy, E. (2013) ‘Rethinking models of feedback for learning: The challenge of
design’, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 38(6), pp. 698–712. doi:
10.1080/02602938.2012.691462.
Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. (2004) Conditions r which assessment supports students' learning. Learning and
Teaching in Higher Education. 1(1): 3-31.
Harland, T., McLean, A., Wass, R., Miller, E. and Sim, K. N. (2014) ‘An assessment arms race and its
fallout: High-stakes grading and the case for slow scholarship’, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher
Jessop, T. and Tomas, C. 2016 The implications of programme assessment on student learning.
Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. Published online 2 August 2016.
Jessop, T. and Maleckar, B. (2014). The Influence of disciplinary assessment patterns on student
learning: a comparative study. Studies in Higher Education. Published Online 27 August 2014
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079.2014.943170
Jessop, T. , El Hakim, Y. and Gibbs, G. (2014) The whole is greater than the sum of its parts: a large-scale
study of students’ learning in response to different assessment patterns. Assessment and Evaluation in
Higher Education. 39(1) 73-88.
Nicol, D. (2010) From monologue to dialogue: improving written feedback processes in mass higher
education, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35: 5, 501 – 517.
O'Donovan, B , Price, M. and Rust, C. (2008) 'Developing student understanding of assessment
standards: a nested hierarchy of approaches', Teaching in Higher Education, 13: 2, 205 — 217
Sadler, D. R. (1989) ‘Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’, Instructional
Science, 18(2), pp. 119–144. doi: 10.1007/bf00117714.