This review examines the spaces, gaps, exchanges, and engagements associated with formative feedback in higher education – an area that has enjoyed extensive scholarly attention over the last two decades. Over time, a consensus has developed privileging timely, specific, supportive, and explanatory feedback over less effective measures that rely much too heavily upon directive, overly-negative,...

BACKGROUND The impact of web-based formative assessment practices on performance of undergraduate medical students in summative assessments is not widely studied. This study was conducted among third-year undergraduate medical students of a designated university in Malaysia to compare the effect, on performance in summative assessment, of repeated computer-based formative assessment with automa...

Concerns about non-completion and the quality of the first year student experience have been linked to recent changes in higher education such as modularisation, increased class sizes, greater diversity in the student intake and reduced resources. Improving formative assessment and feedback processes is seen as one way of addressing academic failure, of enhancing the learning experience and stu...

Concerns about noncompletion and the quality of the 1st-year student experience have been linked to recent changes in higher education such as modularisation, increased class sizes, greater diversity in the student intake and reduced resources. Improving formative assessment and feedback processes is seen as one way of addressing academic failure, of enhancing the learning experience and studen...

students having opportunities to practice, most particularly when they are supported with frequent feedback and are taught strategies for planning, revising, and editing their compositions. Formative systems incorporating automated writing scoring provide the opportunities for students to write, receive feedback, and then revise essays in a timely iterative cycle. This chapter provides an analy...

Within the educational community, there is an increasing recognition of the need for formative assessment tools. Effective formative assessment must meet four criteria: it must assess higher order knowledge, identify students’ strengths and weaknesses, provide effective feedback, and be easy to use. Although concept maps and other structural knowledge representation techniques have been used su...

Current computer-based tools for writing instruction show high scoring accuracy but uncertain instructional efficacy. One explanation is that these systems may not effectively communicate valid and appropriate formative feedback. In this paper, we describe an exploratory method for developing feedback algorithms that are grounded in writing pedagogy. The resulting threshold algorithms are shown...

In a still relevant AAHE Bulletin article on evaluation and teaching improvement, Weimer (1987) describes summative evaluation of teaching. She writes that summative evaluation is a judgment about teaching that is used to make a decision—a decision about promotion, tenure, or, even, teaching awards. A summative evaluation of teaching attempts to summarize the complex phenomena of teaching. It t...