Formative Assessment
Description:
Formative Assessment or Formative Feedback can encompass any task that creates feedback to students about learning achievement (Knight, 2001).
In contrast to summative assessment which focuses on grading students, the main purpose of formative assessment is to provide guidance to the student to facilitate learning. For it to be effective students must be encouraged to reveal their misconceptions and therefore high marks (~ > 10%) should not accompany formative assessments. Some examples of formative assessment practice include distributing model answers immediately after an assignment, distributing a frequently asked question/common mistakes front sheet prior to the assignment due date, delivering whole class feedback tutorials, incorporating formal peer/self assessment, distributing an assessment rubric to clarify how the activity will be graded. In higher education, formative assessment is important because assessment and feedback are two topics that are consistently negatively rated by students (see http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2009/nss.htm for example).
There is considerable evidence and opinion that the introduction of high-quality formative or developmental feedback is the single most useful thing that we as instructors can do to help our students improve (Brown, 2007). When implementing formative feedback, instructors are often concerned by the time implication. If formative feedback is envisaged as a one-to-one tutor-student dialog then this is certainly the case. It does not have to be, and the examples given earlier in this introduction are tutor-class or student-student dialogs. For more information on formative assessment consult the resource (formative assessment.pdf) which contains the slides of a TLU workshop on formative assessment.
Another quality resource is the REAP (Re-engineering Assessment Practice) website www.reap.ac.uk especially the paper by David Nicol ‘Principles of good assessment and feedback’. The seminal article in this area is by Sadler, ‘Formative assessment: revisiting the territory’, Assessment in Education, Vol. 5, No. 1, Mar 1998.
References:
Peter Knight, (2001), ‘A Briefing on Key Concepts Formative and summative, criterion & norm-referenced assessment’ LTSN Generic Centre, available at http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/Resources/gc/assess07Keyconcepts%5B1%5D.pdf
Brown (2007), ‘Feedback and Feedforward’, Centre for Bioscience BULLETIN, http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/ftp/newsletters/bulletin22.pdf
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