Implementing summative assessment with a formative flavour: a case study in a large class

Figures & data

Figure 1. Three linked health behaviour journal assessments.

Table 1. Examples of the features of information given by markers.

Salutation and interpersonal communications	Addressing student by name, may include commenting on personal circumstances (either known from class, what they have written in their journal, or other communication e.g. email), or on effort or prior performance
Avoid ambiguous statements	Ambiguous statements are avoided, and concrete examples are used to increase the student’s understanding. For example, while lovely to hear, statements like ‘that was fantastic’ and ‘you did a great job’, do not provide the student with any information about what exactly they did well
Explicit statements about good performance	Markers explicitly state what the student did well, so that the student is able to replicate the skill, e.g. ‘I liked how you argued X by giving examples. I particularly like when you wrote X and Y…’
Explicit statements about improving poor performance	The same practice as above is applied to any criticisms of the student’s work, particularly as students may not have done ‘X’ because they don’t know how
Constructive guidance on how to do better in the next journal	At specific touch points, assessors use strategies to help orient students to what quality looks like in successive assessment (e.g. feedforward). An example of information used to influence subsequent behaviour is: ‘However, what was just missing here was really explaining how those strategies would actually work to increase your sense of control. This is going to be really important to do in your next assessment in question one where you need to come up with strategies of how to increase your self-efficacy for each of Bandura’s four ways of building self-efficacy …’
Send off and good luck	Mostly relationship building, encouraging students to incorporate comments into the next journal, giving best wishes and invitation to discuss further

Figure 2. The marking and audio moderation process.

Figure 3. How the assessment, exemplar and feedback in the case study fit together.

Table 2. Student’s satisfaction with the feedback they received.

		% Agree
Pre-audio feedback but with exemplar
BENCHMARK: Deakin, Sem 2, 2010 (n = 31,598)		72
HBS110, Sem 2, 2010 (n responses = 360)		79
Audio feedback given
Sem 1, 2011 (n responses = 70)		87
Sem 2, 2011 (n responses = 426)		88
Sem 1, 2012 (n responses = 81)		90
Sem 2, 2012 (n responses = 485)		87
Sem 1, 2013 (n responses = 73)		89
Sem 2, 2013 (n responses = 540)		88
Feed-forward feedback given
Sem 1, 2014 (n responses = 89)		94
Sem 2, 2014 (n responses = 534)		94
Sem 1, 2015 (n responses = 130)		99
Sem 2, 2015 (n responses = 533)		96
Sem 1, 2016 (n responses = 87)		95
Sem 2, 2016 (n responses = 318)		94
BENCHMARK: Deakin, Sem 2, 2016 (n responses = 29,218)		81