e-assessment (f)or learning

Reading through my notes on some of the many assessment papers I have read, I’m finding a few of those ‘sit up and take note’ quotes; things (sometimes very obvious) that other people somehow manage to say so much better than I can. So, I bring you the first of an occasional series of ‘Quote of the day’:

…’ summative assessment is itself ‘formative’. It cannot help but be formative. This is not an issue. At issue is whether that formative potential of summative assessment is lethal or emancipatory. Does summative assessment exert its power to discipline and control, a power so possibly lethal that the student may be wounded for life?’

Barnett, Ronald (2007) Assessment in higher education: an impossible mission? In Boud, David and Falchikov, Nancy (eds) Rethinking assessment in higher education. London, Routledge. pg37.

I’ve posted before about the fact that whilst students usually engage quite well with formative-only iCMA questions, when the going gets tough, they are inevitably more likely to guess than is the case when the mark counts. When I eventually get to the end of my course writing (and associated preference for blogging about things to do with maths misunderstandings, on the basis that this is relevant for the course writing too), I will talk about our changes of assessment strategy in the Open University Science Faculty. For now, I just want to reflect on the size of the formative vs summative effect. Don’t treat this too seriously, but I think the answer to ‘how big is the effect’ may be 3%. Read on.

Conside the question shown on the right. Variants of this question occur both in the formative practice assessment and in one of the summative end-of-module assessments.

In the practice assessment, 74.3% of responses were correct whilst 6.2% gave the number given in the question (so for this variant, they gave an answer of 4 – presumably guessing). In the summative equivalent, 77.7% of responses were correct whilst 3.3% gave the number given in the question.

I promise that this will be my last post about the difference between summative and formative assessment per se.  It seems to be something that bothers people; maybe I’ve caught the bug!

I used to imagine a continuum that had formative assessment at one end and summative assessment at the other, and the  debate hinged around whether you believed that the formative (‘assessment for learning’) or summative (‘assessment of learning’) function was more important i.e. where on this continuum you sat. Bull and McKenna talked about a blurring of the boundaries of formative and summative assessment, and I agreed.

But actually I think you can go further than that. Surely summative and formative assessment are just different things. Summative assessment is about measuring; formative assesment is about learning. Surely both can happen at the same time (or neither! - on the basis that assessment isn’t formative just because it is meant to be). Formative assessment can be summative; summative assessment can be formative.

The title of this post may sound contradictory. If we give students marks, the assessment is summative. Right? Not necessarily. It is perfectly possible to tell students their ‘mark’ for an assignment but for that mark not to count towards the final outcome (so this assessment is purely formative). Similarly, it is possible for a grade from an assignment to count towards the final outcome (and so be summative) even if the student is not told this grade. (more…)

Given tha amount of work that we put into formative assessment, why don’t students do better in summative assessment?

This was one of the recurring themes at the EARLI/Northumbria Assessment Conference, first raised in Liz McDowell’s keynote. Liz wondered if the explanation might be that we sometimes norm-reference our summative assessment, even when we claim we don’t do this.

Sue Bloxham (in discussion after Liz’s paper) and Gordon Stobart (in the final keynote of the Conference) saw the problem as a lack of alignment between formative and summative assessment.

If our formative interventions are not having any obvious impact, we certainly ought to be investigating this further.

I’m a bit slow on the uptake. I’ve now moved on from the EARLI/Northumbria Assessment Conference in Northumberland to ALT-C 2010 in Nottingham, with a day of walking, a day of writing and a day of interviewing in between. Before my thinking gets clouded with lots of things from ALT-C, I want to return to some of the issues raised at the EARLI/Northumbria Assessment Conference. In fact I want to return right to the beginning, to Royce Sadler’s keynote in which he suggested that all summative assessment should be at the end of a period of teaching, not during it i.e. that it should be terminal not continuous. (more…)

I’m at the EARLI/Northumbria Assessment Conference at the Slaley Hall Hotel in Northumberland (UK). Yesterday Royce Sadler got the conference off to a fine start with a challenging Keynote ‘Close-range assessment practices with high yield prospects’. ‘Close-range’ refers to things that are within the reach of teachers; ‘high-impact’ refers to things that might have a substantial impact on learning. Professor Sadler focussed on the assessment of achievement with all the sense of satisfaction that this brings. (more…)