Submission rates for formative assessments continue to fall. Many students do not submit at all and others make no serious attempt, submitting drafts, notes, bullet-point lists or incomplete answers.
Even though institutions emphasise the value of formative work and its contribution to later improvement in summative work, there has been little change to this downward trend. Not only are students missing out on important learning opportunities, but more significantly, the mistakes they make in their summative work could also have been avoided if they had engaged meaningfully with the formative assessment beforehand.
This project, funded by the University of Surrey Learning Fund, explored the barriers that deter students from completing formative assessment and asked them to suggest measures that could overcome these barriers.
Why don’t students complete formative assessment?
We expected students to say one of two things. Either that they simply did not have the time to do formative work, or, that they were reluctant to spend time and energy on work that would not count towards their overall degree result. Surprisingly, the most common explanation was actually fear of failure. Students were unsure how to go about answering formative questions. They felt overwhelmed and under-confident, so they chose either not to attempt them at all, or to submit something sketchy at best. This avoided (or at least minimised) the uncomfortable emotions of anxiety, panic and frustration which arise when they feel unequipped to tackle a piece of work.
Students also had a sense that the feedback they would receive on their formative work would not be useful enough to justify the effort and negative emotions involved in producing it. They felt let down and demotivated by poor quality feedback and described examples of written feedback that was cursory, generic and generally uninformative. They saw little value in peer-to-peer feedback (‘why would I want someone who is as confused as me telling me what they think?’) and viewed group feedback as meaningless (‘going through the answer in a lecture doesn’t tell me anything about my work’). Without effective feedback, there is little incentive for students to overcome their lack of confidence and push past the emotional challenges of completing formative work.
What do students want?
Students identified measures to overcome these formative assessment challenges in two World Café events. The central premise of the World Café format is that people like to talk about things that matter to them and there is great wisdom to be found in shared conversations. It promotes sharing of ideas in an informal café-style setting where participants identify and solve problems in response to short prompt questions, recording their thoughts on paper tablecloths. Group composition changes after each question which ensures that ideas are cross-pollinated around the room.
The students worked enthusiastically and came up with this list:
- lectures, tutorials, reading and other learning activities should be signposted to highlight the contribution they make to the knowledge and/ or skills required for the formative coursework
- a single, complete piece of work is daunting. Formative assessment could be divided into a series of smaller ‘bite-size’ tasks with feedback after each of them
- there should be opportunities ‘pre-feedback’ formative guidance during the creation of the work so that students can check if they have understood the task and if they are doing it correctly
- a supervised writing session should be timetabled during the formative period in which students work with a lecturer on hand to answer questions and provide individual guidance
- a bank of reference resources in the form of short (no more than three minute) videos could be created to provide guidance on things students tend to find confusing or difficult. This would be especially useful for students who lack confidence to ask lecturers for help
- feedback format should be varied by creating a ‘feedback buffet’ in which students could choose the type of feedback (written, audio, video or in-person) and when to have it
- there should be a Q&A panel event at the start of term with a lecturer from each module present so that students can ask questions to understand the different requirements of the formative assessments in each module from the outset.
Implementing these measures would go a significant way towards addressing the key barriers that stop many students from completing their formative assessment effectively. The suggestions are aimed at improving understanding of how to tackle the assessment and dividing the assessment into a series of small tasks to make it feel more manageable. These measures, in conjunction with the additional sources of support and guidance identified, should improve student confidence to tackle the assessment. However, it is quite a shift in approach as students clearly want an approach to formative assessment that is more of a collaborative endeavour with lecturer support woven throughout it.
There is a lot to be learned from listening to students and the World Café is an excellent way of facilitating those important conversations. If you would like a World Café event with your students, please get in touch (e.finch@surrey.ac.uk) or visit www.justicecafe.co.uk.