e-assessment (f)or learning

So what else affects the length of student responses to short-answer free-text questions? (more…)

I’ve been looking at student responses to our short-answer free-text questions. I’ll start by considering something simple; how long are the responses? (more…)

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.

While I’ve been absent from this blog I’ve been doing lots of analysis of student responses to our questions. More on that to follow. I’ve also been reading a variety of stuff, including the report on the  JISC-funded project ’Scoping a vision for formative e-assessment’ and a selection of papers about the same work. I don’t agree with everything in this report, but I do absolutely agree that ‘no assessment technology is in itself formative, but almost any technology can be used in a formative way – if the right conditions are set in place’. I also agree that problems arise when practices are driven by ‘state-of-the-art technological know-how rather than pedagogy’.

The report identifies design ‘patterns’ of processes in formative assessment that can be supported by software tools. (more…)