Talk given at Critical Conversation London South Bank University

1. Out of the long shadow of the NSS:
TESTA’s transformative potential
@solentlearning
@tansyjtweets
Tansy Jessop
TESTA Project Leader
16 November 2017

2. Today’s session
• TESTA’s USP
• Three problems in A&F in HE
• Evidence, strategies, action

3. What is the main assessment and feedback
challenge you face?
Your thoughts

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. It was heavy, tons of
marking for the tutor. It
was such hard work. It was
criminal.
Media Course Leader
I’m really bad at reading
feedback. I’ll look at the mark
and then be like ‘well stuff it, I
can’t do anything about it’
Student, TESTA focus group
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. The best approach from the student’s perspective is to focus
on concepts. I’m sorry to break it to you, but your students are
not going to remember 90 per cent – possibly 99 per cent – of
what you teach them unless it’s conceptual…. when broad,
over-arching connections are made, education occurs. Most
details are only a necessary means to that end.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/a-students-
lecture-to-rofessors/2013238.fullarticle#.U3orx_f9xWc.twitter
A student’s lecture to her professor

18. Problem 3: Academic reading and
writing

19. Is assessment environment prompting
it enough?
Significant learning
gains for students who
1) Read > 40 pages a
week of academic
writing
2) Write > 20 pages per
semester for each unit

20. Writing as thinking

21. 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

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

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

24. 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

25. 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

26. Actions based on evidence
a) Reduction in summative
b) Increase in formative
c) Streamlined varieties
d) More or less feedback depending…
e) Quantifiable
f) Every time a coconut with each feature

27. 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

28. Assessment Arms Race

29. 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

30. 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?

31. 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.

32. So, how do engage students in
meaningful formative?
Go to www.menti.com and use the code 24 59 70
Choose the strategies you think work best

33. 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

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

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

36. Principles of good formative
1. Reduce summative to increase formative
2. Whole programme approach
3. Give meaningful feedback
4. Public domain
5. Multi-stage, linked formative and summative
6. Risky, creative, challenging tasks
7. Collaborative

37. Theme 3: Disconnected feedback

38. System-wide problems
• Modular structures impede feedback
• Students don’t feel known
• There is very little formative feedback
• Lecturers do too much judging; students too little

39. Mass HE is squeezing out dialogue
with the result that written feedback,
which is essentially a one-way communication,
has to carry almost all the burden of
student-teacher interaction
David Nicol 2010

40. A feedback dialogue

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

42. An impoverished dialogue
The many diverse
expressions of
dissatisfaction with
feedback can be taken as
symptoms of an
impoverished and
fractured dialogue
David Nicol 2010

43. Take five
• Choose a quote that
strikes you.
• What is the key issue?
• What strategies might
address this issue?

44. 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

45. 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

46. 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

47. Students feedback to us

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

49. 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

50. 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.

51. 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”.

52. The papers agree…
https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/examiners-give-hugely-different-
marks/2019946.article

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

54. Having ‘an eye for a dog’

55. 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).

56. 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

58. References
Arum R. and Roksa J. 2011. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. University of Chicago
Press.
Barlow, A. and Jessop, T. 2016. “You can’t write a load of rubbish”: Why blogging works as formative
assessment. Educational Development. 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.
Carr,. N. 2010. The Shallows. London. Atlantic Books
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. Published online 2 August 2016.
Jessop, T. and Maleckar, B. (2014). The Influence of disciplinary assessment patterns on student learning: a
comparative study. Studies in Higher Education. Published Online 27 August 2014
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079.2014.943170
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.