"How can we design assessment tasks, so they inspire our students to learn? How can we use assessment to enthuse our learners, and keep them engaged? What are the processes which underpin effective feedback and what are some of the barriers and challenges we face in helping students’ uptake of feedback? How can we approach feedback so that it is meaningful and useful to students, but manageable for ourselves? How far and in what ways do we involve students in the process of evaluative judgment, so they learn to see how they are going while they are working on tasks? These are some of the questions and issues that were explored and discussed in this interactive seminar on engaging students in assessment and feedback processes. Participants who attended this: Explored key principles underpinning the design of Assessment for Learning (AfL) in Higher Education (Sambell et al, 2013), which include assessment for and as learning; Discussed the benefits, challenges and strategies colleagues in different disciplines use to engage learners as productively as possible in assessment and feedback processes; Gained access to practical AfL resources, shared ideas with each other and considered pragmatic tactics to develop students’ assessment and feedback literacy."

"Assessment is probably the most important thing we can do to help our students learn. Traditionally, our assessment practices tend to be summative, for the purposes of progression and completion, rather than formative, for the purposes of improving instruction and student learning. If assessment is to be an integral part of student learning, formative assessment must be at the heart of the process. Formative assessment refers to a wide variety of methods that educators can use to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, module, or programme. Formative assessments help educators identify concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning standards they have not yet achieved so that adjustments can be made to lessons, instructional techniques, and academic support. If we wish to use assessment as a tool to enhance student learning the provision of formative feedback is crucial. We need to help students understand not only where they have gone wrong, but also what they need to do to improve and when they have done well, we need to help them understand what is good about their work and how they can build on it and develop further. This workshop was aimed at all academic staff, whether new to the whole notion of formative assessment and feedback, or those who wanted to improve their feedback practice to students, or those looking for innovative ideas on how to enhance their current practices. It provided participants with an opportunity to think about the benefits of formative assessment and providing formative feedback to learners and an opportunity to examine some case studies of how this can be done in practice."

When we present students with unfamiliar assessment formats, it can be difficult for them to work out what is expected of them and more difficult on occasions for them to recognise what kind of work is good enough to match required standards. If we are able to show rather than just tell them what we are looking for, they are more likely to achieve higher standards. Exemplars are a well-established means of helping students get the hang of new-to-them assessment genres and can save a lot of anguish on both sides.

Students, especially those from diverse cultural backgrounds, often find the first assignment on a course really challenging, particularly if they are ‘first in family’ to go to university and may therefore have a limited understanding of what is likely to be expected of them. It therefore pays dividends if staff put resources and energy into helping students get to know the rules of the game. Students may be able to successfully manage the unfamiliarity of new learning contexts and classroom environments that are very different to what they have experienced before. However, they can’t avoid the need to be successful in assessment if they are to progress. It’s part of our job therefore to help students overcome any uneasiness, and the best way to do this is to demystify the process and give them stress-free opportunities to practice the competencies they eventually need to demonstrate to meet the learning outcomes

Many authors (including Nicol, 2010 and Carless, 2013) suggest that good feedback should always be a dialogue, not a monologue from tutors. Students can become very good at self-assessing their work, but usually don’t have the opportunity to fine-tune their self-assessment and need feedback to help them on their way. If we just ask: ‘try to work out what your mark or grade is?’ they’re likelyvto just guess, and then probably forget what they guessed. While some students might select a grade close to that which you gave them, studies show that ‘high achievers’ underestimate their abilities and the majority of under-achievers will overestimate their mark. Research shows (Clouder, Broughan, Jewell & Steventon, 2012) that this trend is retained across different nationalities but interestingly, students form different nationalities can also have different perspectives of their abilities. Therefore, we need to educate students about making assessment judgements against well-expressed criteria, just as we try to do when we assess their work.

When they are clearly focused, well-crafted essay topics allow students to demonstrate how well they can access and manage information in meaningful ways” (Morgan, Dunn, Parry, & O’Reilly, 2004, p. 111) but many argue that writing essays isn’t the best preparation for functioning effectively in the 21st century, when oral presentation and working well with others may be more important considerations. However, others argue that essays can allow students to show their creativity and skills at writing an argument or making a case. Whichever is the case, there are five main problems with the over-use of essays as an assessment device: • They take a great deal of time to mark, let alone the time it takes for students to prepare, draft and compose them. • When most assessment is in the form of essays, students’ skills at essay-writing are repeatedly tested, at the expense sometimes of their understanding of the subject. • Lots of research shows that we’re not at all good at marking essays fairly – different assessors often give the same essay very different marks. • Essay marks often tend to lie between 35% for a poor one and 75% for a very good one, whereas in many other disciplines the marks for an assignment like a lab report can range across the whole 0-100% span more evenly. • With coursework essays, there can be doubt about veracity – i.e. whodunit?! (Race, 2014) Of course, essay questions in exams largely get over the last of the above problems but assessing them often relies heavily on how effective students are at writing legibly and fast, which can have little to do with their grasp of the subject matter.

We are often keen to encourage students to submit assignments in advance of their final submissions, but we need to be able to do this efficiently and effectively, since few of us have the time to provide detailed comments on drafts provided by lots of our students. The ideas set out here are designed to illustrate how we can help our students to improve their work-in-progress without making unfeasible amounts of work for the hard-pressed markers

Assessors complain that they spend hours devising and delivering good feedback via comments on assessed work, in class, in studio critiques, on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), in one-to-ones and in tutorials, only to find that students seem to either ignore the formative comments or complain they never get any feedback. If students ignore or trivialise our feedback, it cannot help them however detailed and supportive it is. Students’ failure to engage with feedback not only is unhelpful to them and frustrating for us, but also impacts negatively on Irish Survey of Student Engagement (ISSE) scores.