Keynote for Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Royal Holloway University

1. Improving student learning through
programme assessment approaches
@solentlearning
@tansyjtweets
Tansy Jessop
Royal Holloway University
15 February 2018

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

3. Your main A&F challenges

4. A state of alienation?
Image, "Alienation Nightmare" © 1996 by Sabu

5. The modular degree

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

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

9. Problems and some strategies for…
1. High summative and low formative diets
2. Disconnected feedback
3. 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. 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

12. Assessment Arms Race

13. 1 minute pause: your experience
Which of these
quotations resonates,
and why?
Any ideas to address the
problem?

14. 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

15. 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.
The benefits
of formative

16. 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.

17. 1) Low-risk way of 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).
Why formative matters

18. How to encourage formative
Go to www.menti.com and use the code 35 78 99
Choose your top three strategies for engaging
students in formative assessment

19. This is how!

20. 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

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

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

23. Principles of good formative
1. Less summative makes space for more formative
2. Whole programme approach
3. Authentic, public domain tasks
4. Link formative and summative
5. Risky, creative, challenging tasks
6. Collaborative tasks
7. Feedback

24. 2. Disconnected feedback

25. 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

26. 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

27. A feedback dialogue

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

29. 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

30. Students feedback to us

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

32. Theme 3: Confusion about goals and
standards
• Consistently low scores on the AEQ for clear
goals and standards
• Alienation from the tools
• Perceptions of marker variation, unfair
standards and inconsistencies in practice

33. 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.

34. 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”.

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

36. Taking action: internalising goals and
standards
• Regular calibration exercises
• Team discussion and dialogue
Lecturers
• Rewrite/co-create criteria
• Discussing exemplars
Lecturers
and students
• Enter secret garden - peer review
• Engage in drafting processes
Students

37. TESTA programme effects
• Rebalancing formative and summative
• Greater connections across modules
• Better sequencing and progression of
assessment across the programme
• New approaches to formative
• Team curriculum design
• Improved student learning and NSS scores.

38. From this educational paradigm…

39. The 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 Developments. 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 Education
Jessop, T. and Tomas, C. 2016. The implications of programme assessment on student learning. Assessment
and Evaluation in Higher Education.
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.