This document outlines a workshop on the TESTA (Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment) program approach. It discusses challenges with current assessment practices, such as an over-reliance on summative assessment, disconnected feedback, and lack of clarity around goals and standards. The workshop then introduces the TESTA program, which aims to address these issues through a whole-program approach that balances formative and summative assessment, links the two, uses authentic tasks, and focuses on relational feedback. Case studies are presented that show how specific programs implemented TESTA principles. The document argues this shifts the paradigm from a content-focused to learning-focused approach.

1. The why and what of TESTA
@solentlearning
@tansyjtweets
Tansy Jessop
TESTA Workshop
University of Westminster
4 October 2018

2. Workshop plan
• Your assessment and feedback highs and lows
• Why a programme approach?
• Brief explanation of TESTA
• Three themes in the data
• A paradigm shift

3. Powerful assessment

4. What are your main assessment and
feedback challenges?

5. Why take a programme approach?
1. A modular problem
2. A curriculum problem
3. An alienation problem
4. An engagement solution

6. The modular degree

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

8. Curriculum privileges knowing stuff

9. Learning how to learn
Caring
Human dimension
Integration
Application
Foundational knowledge: Topics A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I…
The learning-
centred
paradigm
pushes
teaching and
learning in
this direction,
into multiple
dimensions of
learning
The content-centred paradigm pushes teaching and
learning in this direction, along one dimension of learning
Content vs learning-oriented (Fink 2003)

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

11. Motorways to alienation
• M1: Modules
• M2: Markets
• M3: Metrics
• M4: Mass higher education

12. TESTA improves students’ perceptions
of A&F…
60%
65%
70%
75%
80%
85%
90%
95%
Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 OS
AVERAGENSSSCORES
COMPARISON OF 32 PROGS IN 13 UNIVERSITIES WITH SECTOR SCORES
NSS 2015 SCORES TESTA SCORES

13. …and improves the staff experience
More
engaging
formative
Less
measuring
Students
learning
more
Curriculum
less stuffed

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

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

17. What are the main problems?
1. High summative and low formative diets
2. Disconnected feedback
3. Confusion about goals and standards

18. 1. High summative: low formative
• Low formative to summative ratio of 1:8 (UK,
NZ, Ireland)
• Summative as ‘pedagogy of control’
• Formative weakly practised and understood

19. Assessment Arms Race

20. 1 minute pause: your experience
Which of these
quotations resonates,
and why?
Any ideas to address the
problem?

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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.

24. Formative is the hardest nut to crack…
Go to www.menti.com and use the code 97 97 66
Type in three reasons why students may be
reluctant to invest time and energy in completing
formative assessment tasks

25. 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).
Yet formative is vital

26. How to encourage formative

27. 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

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

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

30. TESTA principles
1. Rebalance summative and formative
2. Whole programme approach
3. Link formative and summative
4. Authentic, public domain tasks
5. Creative, collaborative, challenging tasks
6. Relational and conversational feedback

31. 2. Disconnected feedback

32. 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

33. 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

34. A feedback dialogue

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

36. A way of thinking about assessment and
feedback?

37. 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

38. Students feedback to us

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

40. 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

41. 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.

42. 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”.

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

44. 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

45. Shifting paradigms from this…

46. …to the adult equivalent of this

47. Coffee time! Before the nuts and
bolts…
Ok stop all the
fluff… how do I
actually do
TESTA?
Fear not! That’s
next up!

48. 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.
Tomas, C. and Jessop, T. 2018. Struggling and juggling: A comparison of student assessment loads across
teaching and research-intensive universities. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education.
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.