This document summarizes a presentation about TESTA (Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment), an assessment program that takes a holistic, program-wide approach. It addresses three common problems in assessment: variations in outcomes without understanding why, challenges with curriculum design, and difficulties with academic reading and writing. The presentation covered TESTA's evidence and strategies for improving assessment patterns, balancing formative and summative assessments, providing more connected feedback, and clarifying goals and standards to reduce student confusion.

1. Out of the long shadow of the NSS:
TESTA’s transformative potential
@solentlearning
@tansyjtweets
Tansy Jessop
Educational Excellence Seminar
University of Bristol
28 November 2017

2. Today’s session
• TESTA’s USP: a programme-wide approach
• Three problems TESTA addresses
• Four themes: evidence & strategies

3. Main assessment & feedback challenges
(n=26 responses)

5. Research and change process
Programme
Team
Meeting
Assessment
Experience
Questionnaire
(AEQ)
TESTA
Programme
Audit
Student
Focus Groups

6. Sustained growth

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

8. A modular degree

9. Three problems TESTA addresses
1. Things going awry but not sure why
2. Curriculum design challenge
3. Academic reading and writing challenge

10. 1. Things going awry, not sure why

11. Wow! Our students
love History! Fantastic!

12. Whoops there’s a little
problem here

13. Fix it!
Ok, we’ll look especially at polishing
up our feedback. Students seems to
find that the least best thing.

14. Problem 2: Curriculum design
challenge

15. Does IKEA 101 work for complex learning?

16. Privileges knowing stuff

17. Problem 3: Academic reading and
writing

18. Significant learning
gains for students who
1) Read > 40 pages a
week of academic
writing
2) Write > 20 pages per
semester for each unit

19. TESTA evidence and strategies for…
1. Variations in assessment patterns
2. High summative and low formative diets
3. Disconnected feedback
4. Confusion about goals and standards

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

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

22. 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

23. Typical A&F patterns
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

24. Theme 2: High summative: low formative
• Summative ‘pedagogies of control’
• Circa 2 per module in UK
• Ratio of 1:8 of formative to summative
• Formative weakly understood and practised

25. Assessment Arms Race

26. 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

27. 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?

28. 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.

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

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

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

32. 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

33. Theme 3: Disconnected feedback

34. Take five
• Choose a quote that
resonates and have a
quick chat to the person
next to you about why it
rings true.

35. 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

36. 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

37. A feedback dialogue

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

39. 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

40. Students feedback to us

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

42. 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

43. 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.

44. 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”.

45. Implicit
Criteria
Explicit
Written
I justify
Co-creation
and
participation
Active
engagement
by students
O'Donovan, B , Price, M. and Rust, C. (2008)

46. Having ‘an eye for a dog’

47. The Art and Science of Evaluation
Judging is both an art and a science: It is an art because
the decisions with which a judge is constantly faced are
very often based on considerations of an intangible
nature that cannot be recognized intuitively. It is also a
science because without a sound knowledge of a dog’s
points and anatomy, a judge cannot make a proper
assessment of it whether it is standing or in motion.
Take them round please: the art of judging dogs (Horner, 1975).

48. 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

50. References
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