Formative Assessment
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Formative assessment ensures learner engagement by providing feedback to students and staff to help students learn and identify misconceptions. It assesses student progress towards goals through both informal and formal assessment activities integrated with feedback, unlike summative assessment which measures learning through marks. To effectively engage students in formative assessment, it should be student-centered, interesting, and develop their identity and interests in authentically relating their learning to future aspirations through enjoyment and a sense of belonging.
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Formative Assessment
- 1. Formative Assessment ensuring learner engagement What, Why, How? Teaching Essentials: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/teaching/ Course-focused Practice: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/cfp
- 2. Motivation Creating learning opportunities and structure Generating feedback for students and staff Grading Quality assurance for internal and external systems Why assess students? FormativeSummative Formative assessment: Key ideas Rust, C. (2015). Basic assessment issues and terminology. Higher Education Academy. Online at: https://assessmentinhe.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/rust_assessment_terminology.pdf
- 3. Helps students learn Identifies misconceptions in a timely way Incorporates feedforward Check areas for improvement Formative or Summative Identifies how much has been learnt Generates marks Can be difficult to incorporate in-module feedback Assess progress against goals Learn Measure Ask - How much ‘activity’ around assessment is focused on building learning, compared with measuring it? Do your students get a consistent message about why and how we learn at university?
- 4. an informal – formal continuum with integrated feedback Formative assessment: Key ideas formative Assessment Informal formative activities Formative Assessment Formal formative interventions Summative Assessment e.g. classroom interaction e.g. specified assessment for learning
- 5. Formative assessment: How To engage students in formative assessment they must want to engage! (Race, 2007) Discuss the Benefits Develop aspirations Relate activities to future aspirations Foster a sense of expertise by gaining experience Experience good feelings Feedback that makes a difference Design for Enjoyment Enjoying ‘becoming’ Enjoying knowing the detail Being proud Enjoying being with people Focus on Identity Doing the things they aspire to do Consciously learning to think in new ways Authentic context - real problems and opportunities Course belonging – a co-operative ethos Make it Student-centred Develop Interest: develop a student’s interest in investing by making it interesting!
- 6. Review these questions – over to you How much time do we currently spend in class talking with students and each other about how we learn in university, and why we learn this way? What does student-centred learning mean in practice? Do we have examples? Can we work to the highest (rather than lowest) common denominator when we design our learning environment? Can we risk losing ‘non-engagers’? What strategies do/can we deploy to challenge non-engagement with formative assessment? Discussion
- 7. Personally What do you take from the discussion and what more would you like to find out or think about? Collectively How can your course team or subject group make use of these ideas? What further development would be useful for you? Your Action Plan
Editor's Notes
- Formative assessment is understood in different ways across the University. Here we look at two meanings and consider why they are both important. This presentation also looks at the relation of formative assessment to summative assessment and the role of feedback in this relationship. However, critical to all this, is the desire of students to engage with formative activities, and this presentation will introduce ways to ensure students do engage in activities which do not directly reward them with marks.
- First, let’s look at the role of assessment in general. *** Rust explains that, “We actually assess students for quite a range of different reasons - motivation, *** creating learning opportunities, *** to give feedback for the benefit of students and tutors to chart progress, *** as part of the grading process to explain or justify marks, *** and as a quality assurance mechanism (both for internal and external systems).” *** We can see how these purposes help us to think about the differences between assessment as primarly a formative activity and assessment as foremost a summative activity. ------------- Rust, C. (2015). Basic assessment issues and terminology. Higher Education Academy. Online at: https://assessmentinhe.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/rust_assessment_terminology.pdf Broadly speaking the first few points are mostly associated with formative assessment, while summative assessment focuses on the measurement of students attainment and ensuring that the course is of a sufficient quality. The purpose of formative assessment is to: provide feedback to students motivate them diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses, and To help them develop self-awareness.
- Rust expands on this. He says, “This is the distinction between assessment which is mainly intended to help the student learn and assessment intended to identify how much has been learnt. Formative assessment is most useful part way through a …module, and will involve giving the student feedback which they can use to improve their future performance. In practice, and to varying degrees, most forms of assessment probably try to do both...” He continues… It is arguable that assessment in British higher education is too often focused on the summative, and the accumulation of marks, coming at the end of courses, while students would benefit from more opportunities to build on their strengths and learn from their mistakes through the feedback from formative assessment activities staged throughout their course or module. “ His suggestion, then, is that we need to pay much more attention to how we use assessment to motivate students and how we give them useful feedback that will help them learn. We should ask - How much ‘activity’ around assessment in our teaching is focused on building learning, compared with measuring it? Do your students get a consistent message about why and how we learn at university? Rust, C. (2015). Basic assessment issues and terminology. Higher Education Academy. Online at: https://assessmentinhe.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/rust_assessment_terminology.pdf
- As with feedback, there is a lot of confusion about formative assessment. Arguably, that is because we tend to focus on summative assessment as the assessment that really matters. After all, it is the form of assessment where we nail our colours to the mast – where our students stand up to be counted and where we make our judgements about students known. You could think of it differently: Formative assessment is the opportunity that really matters because it is the non-critical opportunity we have as teachers to make sure our students do well! Notice, however, this diagram has two circles labelled ‘formative assessment’. The first is spelt with a lowercase ‘f’. The second, with an uppercase ‘F’’ This represents the two ways people tend to talk about formative assessment. The first describes: Informal formative activities – those that habitually take place in the active learning environment – for example, through discussion, challenges, experiments, debates – activities that challenge the learner to apply and evaluate what they are learning. Here, feedback is usually integrated, informal in nature, provided by the student themselves by reflecting on their learning, or by peers through discussion or group activities, or by the tutor by summarising activities. The second circle describes a more formal form of formative assessment. Here, Formal formative interventions are specifically designed into the teaching to review learning and as an opportunity to formally give students feedback. Here, feedback is carefully designed in response to the ‘low stakes’ formative assessment. It is planned in, so that it is manageable and useful and results in more likelihood of summative success. Finally, Summative assessment is a formal intervention designed to evaluate the student’s successful attainment of learning outcomes during a period of study, such as a module. Here, feedback provides an opportunity to correct misconceptions and to advise the student about how they can improve based on their current performance.
- Many academics report that they struggle to engage their students with formative assessment. They say their students are only interested in activities that award marks – otherwise it’s not worth their time. Clearly, not all students are like this but academics at Hallam, and elsewhere, recognise that engaging some students is really challenging. While this is a huge topic, for the moment, let’s look at how this applies to designing and delivering formative assessment. Race, in his book The Lecturer’s Toolkit, is quite pragmatic. He says, while academics believe they need their students to engage in formative assessments, they actually need to develop intrinsic motivation in their students. In other words, the academic must develop a desire or ‘want’ in their students. The reasons for engaging in something that has no marks attached must be very clearly in their interest. This means you must spend time discussing the purpose of formative assessment activities with students before introducing them and explain how it fits into the module and how it relates to their summative assessment. Focus on benefits, enjoyment, and aspirations *** Beneficial Develop aspirations - connect the learning of theoretical and practical knowledge to its application e.g. case studies, problem-solving, exploration of professional dispositions. Relate activities to future aspirations - students see clearly how their involvement in an activity will help them achieve what they want. Talk openly about what students want from the course and from life. Foster a sense of expertise by gaining experience - taking part allows each student to learn the knowledge and skills that they want, reflect on it, and understand its nuances. Experience good feelings - taking part allows each student to practice what they are good at and provides them with opportunities to enhance their knowledge, skills and dispositions in a safe, challenging and supportive environment. Feedback that matters - taking part creates an opportunity for detailed feedback and reflection on their personal performance, capabilities, and understanding and use of knowledge that will directly help them to do well in summative assessments. *** Enjoyable Enjoying ‘becoming’ - students take part in relevant activities that allow them to practice the skills they will use in the future. Enjoying knowing the detail - the activity is intrinsically interesting because it reveals new insights about the knowledge they have and how it can be used. Being proud - each student is driven to do a good job and take pride in what they are doing. They enjoy producing work they can talk about or show others. Enjoying being with people who share their academic or professional identity, values and aspirations - students can work with others that matter to them, e.g. peers, experts, real world clients. *** Developing a professional identity by, Doing the things they aspire to do Being the person they aspire to be by consciously learning to think in new ways Becoming the person they aspire to be by addressing problems and opportunities in authentic ways Belonging to their course by sharing the formal and informal experiences that come with formative challenges. *** This is about making assessment, and in this case formative assessment, student-centred. Ask, “How am I going to develop their interest in investing in this activity?” While we might expect a student to be interested in every aspect of their course, we have to make sure it is interesting enough to guarantee their active participation. How much ‘activity’ around assessment is focused on building learning, rather than measuring it? Do your summative assessments need to be summative? Can some of them be used more effectively as formative activities? Freed from the need to award marks, does the concept of the formative, low-risk assessment open up creative opportunities to think ‘out the box’ and do something different, exciting, even revolutionary? Is each of your summative assessments accompanied by a preceding formative exercise which allows your students to experiment with their understandings of the key content and access feed-forwards that helps them to refine their learning and the strategies they utilise to demonstrate it? Think about the feed-forward you provide in your formative assessments? Is the feedback clear, transparent and focused on things that students can actually ‘action’ – i.e. take deliberate steps to improve their practice and their summative outputs?” Longford, A. (2017). #15toptips for Student-Centred Teaching 4: Consider the balance between formative and summative assessment. SEDA blog, Online at: https://thesedablog.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/15toptips-4/#more-652 Race, P. (2007). The lecturer's toolkit a practical guide to assessment, learning and teaching (3rd ed.). London: Kogan Page.