See also: Transforming Assessment and Feedback

Assessment as a process has many guises and can serve many purposes:

• as an instrument to grade students’ performance (summative assessment / high stakes assessment / assessment of learning),
• as an instrument to indicate the ability for a student to progress (diagnostic assessment)
• as an instrument to stimulate learning (formative assessment / low stakes assessment / learning oriented assessment / assessment for learning)

Fundamentally, assessment and feedback are crucial to learning and are built into the curriculum cycle, whether intrinsic to the activity, tutor-led, or provided by learners and their peers. Assessment criteria and the rationale for feedback and grading are made transparent. Where appropriate, self-evaluative activities are integrated.

Component processes: formative assessment, assessment planning and delivery, grading, summative feedback, reflection (learners)

Enabling systems: Technology-enabled formative and summative assessment (where appropriate) can ensure prompt feedback and promote active learning. Technology can also record learning processes for reflection and review. See Assessment technologies and learning environments

Whilst many projects in the Curriculum Delivery programme addressed issues around assessment and feedback to enhance the learning experience, some projects made changes to the systems which support these processes to deliver significant efficiencies. ESCAPE were concerned with the effectiveness and efficiencies of their institutional assessment practices, and developed the ESCAPE Toolkit to take academics through the main stages of devising an assessment strategy - the principles of assessment, description of the curriculum, and advice - in a more effective manner.

Assignment handling proved to offer time-saving benefits as well as reducing paper use and storage: the CASCADE project has produce an assignment handling guide, while evidence of time savings were also found by ESCAPE, Making the new Diploma a success, and eBiolabs

‘Students can now submit assignments much more easily at any time from anywhere in the world. It is also possible to predict significant efficiencies in assignment handling time for the Registry staff who deal with student submissions for approximately 260 course assignments across 48 course cohorts a year: a saving of 30 minutes per assignment or more soon cumulates savings in the order of half a day per week. Other advantages of the new online system are the reduction in paper handling and photocopying, as well as better auditing and control. Reduction in paper storage is a further advantage both in terms of less physical space being required and also in terms of less staff time being required to retrieve data from the archive.’ CASCADE

Projects at Bristol University and Exeter University addressed the challenge of supporting assessment of large student cohorts - the e-Biolabs project (University of Bristol) developed a personalised learning environment to support lab-based bioscience and the Integrate project at Exeter looked at a range of technologies which can enhance the learning experience of large and diverse groups of students including assessment.  

Some projects in the Curriculum Design programme are considering how interventions in the design process can help produce curricula in which feedback and assessment are more supportive of learning. Once such project includes Viewpoints (University of Ulster).  One baseline report noted that examinations remain the predominant format for assessment, occupying 70-80% of the final grade in some modules. As with teaching and learning generally, innovating assessment can require changes to costing models (how staff time is calculated), documentation, and general resourcing. Giving students have more choice over how they are assessed, and when, also has organisational implications.

Further Resources:

assessment and feedback (egs. from the Curriculum Design and Delivery projects)

Assessment and Feedback Programme

Resources tagged with 'assessment'

Resources tagged with 'feedback'