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Testa interactive masterclass
This document summarizes key points from a workshop on assessment and feedback. It discusses challenges with current assessment practices, such as an over-reliance on summative assessment, disconnection between formative and summative feedback, and a lack of clear goals and standards. The workshop then introduces the TESTA (Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment) approach, which advocates rebalancing assessment to include more formative tasks, taking a whole-program approach, and linking formative and summative assessment. Case studies are presented that aim to make formative assessment more meaningful for students through tasks like blogging, peer review, and feedback dialogues. The workshop concludes with a discussion of shifting paradigms to create shared
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Testa interactive masterclass
- 1. Interactive masterclass: TESTA @solentlearning @tansyjtweets Tansy Jessop TESTAWorkshop Dublin Institute of Technology 5 October 2018
- 2. Masterclass Session 1 •Your assessment and feedback highs and lows • Why a programme approach? • Brief explanation of TESTA • Common patterns of assessment
- 3. Powerful assessment Think ofa time when you learnt powerfully from an assessment task. What made it powerful? Go to www.menti.com and use the code 47 35 39 Enter three words or phrases which capture something about it
- 4. What are yourmain assessment and feedback challenges?
- 5. Why take aprogramme approach? 1. A modular problem 2. A curriculum problem 3. An alienation problem 4. An engagement solution
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- 7. IKEA 101: greatfor flat-pack furniture but..
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- 9. The best approachfrom 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
- 10. Learning how tolearn Caring Human dimension Integration Application Foundational knowledge: Topics A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I… The learning- centred paradigm pushes teaching and learning in this direction, into multiple dimensions of learning The content-centred paradigm pushes teaching and learning in this direction, along one dimension of learning Content vs learning-oriented (Fink 2003)
- 11. A state ofalienation? Image, "Alienation Nightmare" © 1996 by Sabu
- 12. Motorways to alienation •M1: Modules • M2: Markets? • M3: Metrics? • M4: Mass higher education
- 13. TESTA improves students’perceptions of A&F… 60% 65% 70% 75% 80% 85% 90% 95% Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 OS AVERAGENSSSCORES COMPARISON OF 32 PROGS IN 13 UNIVERSITIES WITH SECTOR SCORES NSS 2015 SCORES TESTA SCORES
- 14. …and improves thestaff experience More engaging formative Less measuring Students learning more Curriculum less stuffed
- 16. Research and changeprocess Programme Team Meeting Assessment Experience Questionnaire (AEQ) TESTA Programme Audit Student Focus Groups
- 17. TESTA definitions Summative: graded assessmentwhich counts towards the degree Formative: Does not count: ungraded, required task with feedback
- 18. Pattern 1: High summativewith low formative • Low formative to summative ratio of 1:8 (UK, NZ, Ireland) • Summative as ‘pedagogy of control’ • Formative weakly practised and understood
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- 20. 1 minute pause:your experience Which of these quotations resonates, and why? Any ideas to address the problem?
- 21. A lot ofpeople 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
- 22. It was reallyuseful. 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. The benefits of formative
- 23. If there weren’tloads 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.
- 24. Formative is thehardest nut to crack… Go to www.menti.com and use the code 97 97 66 Type in three reasons why students may be reluctant to invest time and energy in completing formative assessment tasks
- 25. 1) Low-risk wayof learning from feedback (Sadler, 1989) 2) Fine-tune understanding of goals (Boud 2000, Nicol 2006) 3) Feedback to lecturers to adapt teaching (Hattie, 2009) 4) Cycles of reflection and collaboration (Biggs 2003; Nicol & McFarlane Dick 2006) 5) Encourages and distributes student effort (Gibbs 2004). Yet formative is vital
- 26. How to encourageformative
- 27. Case Study 1 •Systematic reduction of summative across whole business school • Systematic ramping up of formative • All working to similar script • Whole department shift, experimentation, less risky together
- 28. Case Study 2 •Problem: silent seminar, students not reading • Public platform blogging • Current academic texts • In-class • Threads and live discussion • Linked to summative
- 29. Case Study 3 •Problem: lack of discrimination about sources • Students bring 1 x book, 1 x chapter, 1 x journal article, 2 x pop culture articles to seminar • Justify choices to group • Reach consensus about five best sources • Add to reading list
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- 32. TESTA principles 1. Rebalancesummative and formative 2. Whole programme approach 3. Link formative and summative 4. Authentic, public domain tasks 5. Creative, collaborative, challenging tasks 6. Relational and conversational feedback
- 33. Pattern 2: Disconnectedfeedback
- 34. The feedback is generallyfocused 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
- 35. 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
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- 37. Irretrievable breakdown… Your essaylacked structure and your referencing is problematic Your classes are boring and I don’t really like you
- 38. A way ofthinking about assessment and feedback?
- 39. Ways to bedialogic • 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
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- 41. Students to lecturers: CriticalIncident Questionnaire Stephen Brookfield’s Critical Incident Questionnaire http://bit.ly/1loUzq0
- 42. Pattern 3: Confusionabout goals and standards • Consistently low scores on the AEQ for clear goals and standards • Alienation from the tools • Perceptions of marker variation, unfair standards and inconsistencies in practice
- 43. 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.
- 44. 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”.
- 45. Implicit Criteria Explicit Written I justify Co-creation and participation Active engagement by students O'Donovan,B , Price, M. and Rust, C. 2008
- 46. Taking action: internalisinggoals and standards • Regular calibration exercises • Team discussion and dialogue Lecturers • Rewrite/co-create criteria • Discussing exemplars Lecturers and students • Enter secret garden - peer review • Engage in drafting processes Students
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- 48. …to the adultequivalent of this
- 49. Break time! Beforemore nuts and bolts… How does the AEQ work? What will it tell me about the programme? What will I learn about students’ views of assessment from the focus group?
- 50. References Barlow, A. andJessop, T. 2016. “You can’t write a load of rubbish”: Why blogging works as formative assessment. Educational Developments. 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. 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. 2017. The implications of programme assessment on student learning. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. Jessop, T. and Maleckar, B. 2016. The Influence of disciplinary assessment patterns on student learning: a comparative study. Studies in Higher Education. Published Online 27 August 2014 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. Tomas, C and Jessop, T. 2018. Struggling and juggling: A comparison of student assessment loads across research and teaching-intensive universities. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. 18 April. Wu, Q. and Jessop, T. 2018. Formative assessment: missing in action in both research-intensive and teaching- focused universities. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. Published online 15 January.
Editor's Notes
- #2 Tansy
- #7 Disconnected seeing the whole degree in silos – my module, lecturer perspective (Elephant, trunk, ears, tusks etc) compared to student perspective of the whole huge beast. I realise that what we were saying is two per module
- #8 Not so good for complex learning, integrating knowledge, lends itself to disposable curriculum fragmented learning. Amplified summative, less time for formative. Hard to make connections, difficult to see the joins between assessments, much more assessment, much more assessment to accredit each little box. Multiplier effect. Less challenge, less integration. Lots of little neo-liberal tasks. The Assessment Arms Race.
- #9 Language of ‘covering material’ Should we be surprised?
- #15 The TESTA report back of programme findings was by far the most significant meeting I have attended in ten years of sitting through many meetings at this university. For the first time, I felt as though I was a player on the pitch, rather than someone watching from the side-lines. We were discussing real issues. (Senior Lecturer, Education
- #20 Summative as a ‘pedagogy of control’ Teach Less, learn more. Assess less, learn more.
- #42 Is anyone listening?
- #47 Students can increase their understanding of the language of assessment through their active engagement in: ‘observation, imitation, dialogue and practice’ (Rust, Price, and O’Donovan 2003, 152), Dialogue, clever strategies, social practice, relationship building, relinquishing power.