Graham Gibbs video lecture - conclusion have less variety of assessment and get staff to go on a curry night

This lecture is part of the TESTA project. http://www.testa.ac.uk/

I have 'short changed' it a bit here. He is taking a pan institutional viewpoint of issues with assessment. Why is there such a range in behaviour e.g. one programme hand only 1 instance of formative assessment and another had 130.

There are some nice examples of things that work eg http://www.testa.ac.uk/assessment-that-improves-learning-the-case-of-the-engineer. Peer marking of problem based activity.

http://www.testa.ac.uk/assessment-that-improves-learning-the-case-of-the-psyc... putting the most common mistakes on the submission sheets the students have to use when writing their essay

The suprise for me is how disconcerting students find a large range of assessment activities. It is far better to limit these so students get better at using the feedback to improve performance.

But the key outcomes are successful courses have, "lots of formative only, more oral and prompt" http://www.testa.ac.uk/range-of-characteristics-of-programme-level-environments
Meaning courses that have

* highly engaged students,
* that put time in across all the topics,
* understand what they are doing
* and use the feedback

have a design that

* use a lot of formative assessment only (meaning no marks)
* that the feedback is oral
* and given as quickly as possible

Posted via email from abstractrabbit (Jim Turner) posterous