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Frustrating formative
This document summarizes a workshop on making formative assessments more effective for students. It discusses why students are often reluctant to do formative work, and how formative assessments are sometimes poorly implemented. The workshop then presents five case studies of programs that successfully integrated formative assessments. Key principles for good formative assessment identified include: reducing summative assessments to make room for formative work; taking a whole-program team approach; providing developmental feedback; and designing formative assessments that are linked to summative assessments.
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Frustrating formative
- 1. Frustrating formative assessments: howcan I get my students to do them? @solentlearning @tansyjtweets Tansy Jessop SLTI CPD Workshop 6 Feb 2018
- 2. Today’s session • Whywon’t students do formative? • Why formative is broken • A rationale for formative • Five case studies • Principles of formative • How could you adapt and try them out
- 3. Why students won’tdo formative
- 4. Why would youcome to university?
- 5. Why it isbroken 1. HE factory mass produced goods 2. Summative ‘pedagogy of control’ 3. Ideas about student autonomy get in the way 4. Not much conviction about formative – lip service 5. Not programme-wide “Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow” T S Eliot, The Hollow Men
- 6. “Definitional fuzziness” Yorke(2003) “Formative assessment is concerned with how judgements about the quality of student responses can be used to shape and improve students’ competence by short-circuiting the randomness and inefficiency of trial-and-error learning” (Sadler, 1989, p.120). Defining formative assessment
- 7. TESTA definitions Summative: graded assessmentwhich counts towards the degree Formative: Does not count: ungraded, required task with feedback
- 8. 1) Low-risk wayof learning from feedback (Sadler, 1989) 2) Fine-tune understanding of goals (Boud 2000, Nicol 2006) 3) Feedback to lecturers to adapt teaching (Hattie, 2009) 4) Cycles of reflection and collaboration (Biggs 2003; Nicol & McFarlane Dick 2006) 5) Encourages and distributes student effort (Gibbs 2004). Five good reasons to do formative
- 9. The benefits offormative: student voices I find more helpful the feedback you get in informal ways week by week, but there are some people who just hammer on about what will get them a better mark.
- 10. It was reallyuseful. 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.
- 11. If there weren’tloads of other assessments, I’d do it. It’s good to know you’re being graded because you take it more seriously. BUT… If there are no actual consequences of not doing it, most students are going to sit in the bar. The lecturers do formative assessment but we don’t get any feedback on it.
- 12. How to encourageformative Go to www.menti.com and use the code 86 85 6 Choose your top three strategies for engaging students in formative assessment
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- 14. Case Study 1:Business School • Reduction summative across business school • Required formative x 3 per unit • All working to similar script • Systematic shift, experimentation, less risky together
- 15. Case Study 2:Media degree • Formative presentations • Students get feedback (peer and tutor) • Refines their thinking for… • Conceptually linked summative essay
- 16. Case Study 3:Education and social sciences • In-class blogging on academic texts • Personal, reflective and conversational writing • Threads and live discussion • Linked to summative
- 17. Case study 4:Film and TV • Problem: lack of discrimination about sources • Students bring 1 x book, 1 x chapter, 1 x journal article, 2 x pop culture articles to seminar • Justify choices to group • Reach consensus about five best sources • Add to reading list
- 18.
- 19. So, how dowe do formative? Think about the five case studies of successful formative Identify principles that make them work How could you adapt them?
- 20.
- 21. Principles of goodformative 1. Reduce summative to make space for formative 2. Whole programme, team approach 3. Public domain 4. Multi-stage, linked formative and summative 5. Risky, creative, challenging tasks 6. Collaborative 7. Give developmental feedback
- 22. Formative@Solent So, do we havea lift off?
- 23. References Barlow, A. andJessop, T. 2016. “You can’t write a load of rubbish”: Why blogging works as formative assessment. Educational Developments. 17(3), 12-15. SEDA. Gibbs, G. & Simpson, C. 2004. Conditions under 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 Education. 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. 2016. The Influence of disciplinary assessment patterns on student learning: a comparative study. Studies in Higher Education. 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. Sadler, D. R. (1989) ‘Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’, Instructional Science, 18(2), pp. 119–144. doi: 10.1007/bf00117714. Wu, Q. and Jessop, T. 2018. Formative assessment: missing in action in both research- intensive and teaching focused universities. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education.