Digital methods of formative assessment that boost learning

Diana Laurillard of the UCL Knowledge Lab outlines digital instruction methods that help with formative assessment, or assessment for learning, rather than summative assessment for grading. She gives examples of three approaches: peer review, blended assessment and automated assessment. This bite-sized recording was filmed as part of FutureLearn’s free Blended and Online Learning Design course put together by teaching experts at the UCL Institute of Education.

This video will cover: 

00:14 Using peer review to support “meaningful tests” to aid learning

01:37 Blended assessment using video to introduce and feedback on students’ assignments 

02:29 Creating pre-class automated quizzes to provide useful insight into students’ understanding 

So this week begins by focusing on digital methods for formative assessment. 

We begin by looking at peer review and Eileen Kennedy carried out a series of interviews with regular Mooc participants, so they were mostly professional adults, and she found that a key aspect of deep learning for them is what they call “meaningful tests”. 

And of course, peer review is one example of doing a meaningful test.   

[Kennedy speaks] “Participants also valued peer-reviewed assignments for learning. Here they understood that there could be value in the motivation to do a task when you know someone else is going to evaluate what you’ve done.

“And it was the doing of the assignment rather than the review that was useful for some participants, but for others it was doing the review. By applying a good rubric, you can use peer review to help your learners understand what’s required of them.   

“This post-course survey from another Mooc showed that actually giving a peer review was considered more useful for participants than receiving one. 

“But not everyone was happy with peer review because they didn’t always trust the reviewer. That's why it’s better if it’s only one part of an assessment package.   

“It’s not possible to have individual assessment from a tutor on a Mooc but it is in a smaller class. And if the students have already gone through a cycle of peer review then it should be simpler for the educator to provide a final assessment.”   

Scott Hayden does blended assessment and he does that by using video to introduce assessment requirements to his students, and then also uses it to give feedback on their assignments.

[Hayden speaks] “In the top right and bottom left you can see me giving an assignment brief out to students and explaining it to them. So they can rewind, revise and revisit the video as many times as they want to, to get comprehension of what the expectations are for the assignments.  

“And as you can see in the bottom left, the assessments at the formative and summative stage, whereby they get video feedback of me looking through their blog work, their assignments, their videos, their sites, whatever it might be and giving them feedback as I look at it.  

“Alongside that, talking to them down the lens, calling them out by name, more intimate and focused and personal.”

Matt Smith and Sarah Warrens wanted high levels of engagement with their online pre-class activities, so they used automated tests like quizzes and then analysed the pre-class quiz responses. 

That meant they were able to present the students in class with the categories of their responses and so that generated much more discussion and deep learning for the students, following on from what they’d done in the pre-class quiz. 

[Smith speaks] “Clicking responses takes us into the Moodle quiz response area. As you can see, the responses for each question are visible here, however, rather than reviewing them within Moodle, we download them as a CSV file to open in Excel.  

“Before every lecture Sarah reviews the responses to see if students have a good grasp of the core knowledge, any gaps in knowledge she identifies, she can then address in the lecture. The other way  to link the pre-class learning to the face-to-face time is to incorporate the student responses by collating them and presenting them to the class. 

“Here we have the response to the Heinz target markets activity. As you can see, some students have identified vegetarians as the primary target market, whilst others think young people. A very simple way of visualising these responses is as a word cloud.

“Although simple, we have found it to be very powerful. This links the pre-class and face-to-face time and provides the perfect springboard to start discussions and deepen students’ knowledge in this area.  

“We consider connecting the pre-class and face-to-face activities in this way is key to success with the flipped approach.”  

Well that’s a blended way of using quizzes because they’re used partly online and asynchronously, and then following up on them synchronously online.  

And that’s a good way to use them because it gives Sarah a real sense of what her students do and don’t understand. And they’ve structured it so that students know there will be some follow-through from their online work and that’s always motivating.   

Quizzes also offer automated assessment and that means less work for the teacher in the longer run. So Eileen has also investigated student views of automated quizzes.  

[Kennedy speaks] “But when you’re designing an online course it’s not always easy to create a meaningful online quiz for many subjects. If you only have multiple choice quizzes available, what do you do?   

“One way around that we found when designing Moocs on topics like education, which doesn’t have very many yes/no answers, is to present learners with a scenario or statement and provide a choice of theoretical concepts that the statement best illustrates, so you can get a meaningful test. 

“But the key part of the quiz for practice is the feedback and it’s here that you can provide a meaningful learning experience.” 

So we’ll look at all these ways of using online assessment in the first activity this week and the idea is here to make sure that we achieve that meaningful and powerful learning experience that Eileen and Scott and Matt and Sarah have all been exploring. 

Diana Laurillard is professor of learning with digital technologies at the UCL Knowledge Lab, University College London, and one of the creators of the FutureLearn Blended and Online Learning Design course.