Author Archives: Sally Jordan

How long is short?

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?

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Summative and formative are not opposites

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 … Continue reading

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Pedagogy and patterns

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 … Continue reading

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Why assessment isn’t really like central heating

Back in the early days of this blog, I muttered about our misunderstanding of the word ‘feedback’ in the context of assessment and gave examples of positive and negative feedback from everday life. I talked about the thermostat on a central heating system as an … Continue reading

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Not all feedback interactions are helpful

I’ve just finished reading Kluger & DeNisi’s meta-analysis of the impact of feedback interventions on performance. (Kluger, A.N. & DeNisi, A. (1996) The effects of feedback interventions on performance : a historical review, a meta-analysis, and preliminary feedback intervention theory, … Continue reading

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Trying our questions

With apologies, I thought I had put links on this blog to some Open University eAssessment questions, but this was not the case. I’ll add these links to the ‘E-assessment at the Open University’ link (right-hand side of blog) in … Continue reading

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Summative assessment is not the same as giving marks

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 … Continue reading

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Correspondence tuition, or is it just tuition?

We had a wonderful session  at an OU staff development meeting in Cambridge yesterday, discussing ‘Time well spent? Making the most of correspondence tuition’. Follow the links below for a copy of the handout on ‘theory’ and for a summary of our discussions.

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How students react to feedback from a computer

Returning to Lipnevich and Smith’s interesting work (Lipnevich, A.A. & Smith, J.K. (2009) “I really need feedback to learn:” students’ perspectives of the differential feedback messages, Educational Assessment Evaluation & Accountability, 21, 347-367). And for the benefit of those who attended the session … Continue reading

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Feedback, feedforward or feedaround?

This is another of those ideas that others probably thought of years ago, but I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake. In summary, findings about the effectiveness or otherwise of feedback probably depend on what the feedback is meant … Continue reading

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