The starting point for the FAST project was the assumption that assessment has a profound impact on how much effort students put into learning and how their understanding and learning are aided by the quality of their engagement with the assessment tasks they are set and the feedback they receive on the outcomes. The FAST Assessment for Learning framework articulates these factors as a set of 11 ‘conditions’ which, if met, will enable assessment to support students’ learning:

1. Assessment tasks capture sufficient student time and effort
2. The assessment tasks distribute student effort evenly across time and topics
3. The tasks engage students in productive learning activity
4. Assessment communicates clear and high expectations to students
5. Feedback is sufficient, frequent and adequately detailed
6. Feedback is provided quickly enough to be useful
7. Feedback focuses on learning rather than marks
8. Feedback is linked to the purpose of the assignment and to criteria
9. Feedback is understandable by students
10. Feedback is received by students and attended to
11. Feedback is acted upon by students to improve their work or learning

One of the goals of the project was to develop easy-to-use evaluation tools that can be used by practitioners to find out more about the way in which their assessment affects students’ learning. Three main tools were produced:

• The Assessment Experience Questionnaire (AEQ) developed by Gibbs and Simpson (2003).
• The SHUq, developed by Sheffield Hallam University (2004) focuses on levels of feedback received by students, and the degree to which and in what ways feedback helps.
• The Feedback coding tool developed by the Open University (see Brown, Gibbs & Glover, 2003) provides categories of feedback and the codes used to record them, definitions and examples of each category, and a recording sheet to be completed for each assignment, to log the frequency of occurrence of each type of feedback.

A number of other tools have also been produced to be used in conjunction with the main tools or for follow-up investigations. All the tools are available to download on the List of Investigative Tools page.