This document summarizes a presentation about taking a program-level approach to assessment and feedback to improve student learning. It discusses challenges with current assessment practices like high variation in assessment patterns, an over-reliance on summative assessment, and disconnected feedback. The presentation advocates reducing summative assessment to make room for more formative assessment. It provides case studies of programs that have successfully implemented program-level approaches, focusing on increasing formative assessment, linking formative and summative tasks, using feedback as a dialogue, and helping students internalize learning goals and standards. The goal is to shift from a transmission model of education to a more social constructivist model.

1. Improving student learning through
programme assessment
@solentlearning
@tansyjtweets
Tansy Jessop
King’s College London
26 January 2018

2. Today’s session
• Your assessment and feedback challenges
• Brief explanation of TESTA
• Rationale for taking a programme approach
• Four assessment and feedback problems and
some solutions

3. Assessment and feedback challenges

4. Why assessment & feedback?
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).

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

7. The modular degree

8. IKEA 101: great for flat-pack furniture but..

9. Problems and some solutions for…
1. Variations in assessment patterns
2. High summative and low formative diets
3. Disconnected feedback
4. Confusion about goals and standards

10. TESTA definitions
Summative:
graded assessment which counts towards the degree
Formative:
Does not count: ungraded, required task with
feedback

11. 1. Huge variations
• What is striking for
you about this data?
• How does it compare
with your context?
• Does variation
matter?

12. Assessment features across a 3 year UG degree (n=73)
Characteristic Range
Summative 12 -227
Formative 0 - 116
Varieties of assessment 5 - 21
Proportion of examinations 0% - 87%
Time to return marks & feedback 10 - 42 days
Volume of oral feedback 37 -1800 minutes
Volume of written feedback 936 - 22,000 words

13. Typical A&F patterns
(from n=73 programmes in 14 unis)
Characteristic Low Medium High
Volume of summative
assessment
Below 33 40-48 More than 48
Volume of formative only Below 1 5-19 More than 19
% of tasks by examinations Below 11% 22-31% More than 31%
Variety of assessment
methods
Below 8 11-15 More than 15
Written feedback in words Less than 3,800 6,000-7,600 More than 7,600

14. 2. High summative: low formative
• High summative on UK, Irish, NZ and Indian
degrees
• Low formative to summative ratio of 1:8
• Formative weakly practised and understood

15. Assessment Arms Race

16. 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.
CONSEQUENCES
OF HIGH
SUMMATIVE

17. 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.
WHAT ABOUT FORMATIVE?

18. If there weren’t loads
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.

19. 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).
Why formative matters

20. How to encourage formative assessment

21. Case Study 1
• Systematic reduction of summative across
whole business school
• Systematic ramping up of formative
• All working to similar script
• Whole department shift, experimentation,
less risky together

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

23. Case study 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVFwQzlVFy0

24. Principles of good formative
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. Developmental feedback

25. 3. Disconnected feedback

26. The feedback is
generally focused
on the module
Because it’s at the end
of the module, it doesn’t
feed into our future
work.
If 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.
I read it and think “Well,
that’s fine but I’ve already
handed it in now and got the
mark. It’s too late”.
STRUCTURAL

27. It was like ‘Who’s
Holly?’ It’s that
relationship where
you’re just a student.
Because they have to mark so
many that our essay becomes
lost in the sea that they have
to mark.
Here they say ‘Oh yes, I don’t
know who you are. Got too
many to remember, don’t
really care, I’ll mark you on
your assignment’.
RELATIONAL

28. A feedback dialogue

29. Irretrievable breakdown…
Your essay lacked structure and
your referencing is problematic
Your classes are boring and I
don’t really like you 

30. Ways to be dialogic
• Conversation: who starts the dialogue?
• Cycles of reflection across modules
• 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

31. Students feedback to us

32. Students to lecturers:
Critical Incident Questionnaire
Stephen Brookfield’s Critical Incident Questionnaire http://bit.ly/1loUzq0

33. Theme 4: Confusion about goals and
standards
• Consistently low scores on the AEQ for clear
goals and standards
• Alienation from the tools, especially criteria
and guidelines
• Symptoms: perceptions of marker variation,
unfair standards and inconsistencies in practice

34. We’ve got two
tutors- one marks
completely differently
to the other and it’s
pot luck which one
you get.
They read the essay and then
they get a general impression,
then they pluck a mark from
the air.
It’s like Russian
roulette – you may
shoot yourself and
then get an A1.
They have different
criteria, they build up their
own criteria.

35. There are criteria, but I find them really
strange. There’s “writing coherently,
making sure the argument that you
present is backed up with evidence”.

36. Implicit
Criteria
Explicit
Written
I justify
Co-creation
and
participation
Active
engagement
by students

37. Taking action: internalising goals and
standards
• Regular calibration exercises
• Discussion and dialogue
• Discipline specific criteria (no cut and paste)
Lecturers
• Rewrite/co-create criteria
• Marking exercises
• Discussing exemplars
Lecturers
and students
• Enter secret garden - peer review
• Engage in drafting processes
• Self-reflection
Students

38. From this educational paradigm…

39. Transmission Model

40. Social Constructivist Model

41. References
Barlow, A. and Jessop, T. 2016. “You can’t write a load of rubbish”: Why blogging works as formative
assessment. Educational Development. 17(3), 12-15. SEDA.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.