Formative Assessments are for Learning

Intent

Formative assessments are for learning and students should not be punished for getting things wrong while learning.

Problem

Students take courses with varying degrees of prior experience. Those who have learned a subject previously are better equipped to succeed on weekly assignments in a course. Those who are brand new to a subject are still learning how to put the pieces together and are more likely to make mistakes as they learn material.

Formative assessments should be an opportunity for students to interact with new material and explore how everything fits together. [Examples of formative assessments could include weekly labs, weekly quizzes, practice programs, and even certain exams.] Making mistakes or failing to comprehend the complexity of a subject are common situations and students should not be penalized for these situations as the advance towards proficiency.

Unfortunately, traditional grading models frequently grade weekly work based on overall correctness and penalize students who are making legitimate progress but have not yet progressed to mastery.

Solution

Flexible grading of formative assessments can make grades more equitable and improve/promote a growth mindset.

1. Flexible Deadlines: Traditionally, an initial deadline is announced for all formative assessments. Students who do not complete an activity prior to the initial deadline may be reminded that they have an outstanding activity. However, students are not penalized for missing initial deadlines and are actively encouraged to submit missing materials up until a “final” deadline which is often the end of the course but can be earlier for a variety of practical reasons. However, the timeframe between “initial” and “final” deadline should be long enough to accomodate students who fall behind but make a legitimate effort to catch up.

2. Multiple Attempts: Formative assessments are about assessing progress on learning. When done properly, such assessments should help a student identify lingering gaps in their knowledge or when activities are not completed in the way that is expected. When such gaps/deficiencies are identified, students are encouraged to revise and resubmit until students get them “right.”

Assignments can be submitted for an initial assessment and may have conditions in place before a redo/retake attempt is allowed. However, all are understood to be for learning purposes and thus should be open for opportunities to further student learning by revisiting mistakes or improving progress.

Applicability

Revising and resubmitting material is more applicable when activities have some element of creativity and/or personal style and narrative. [code, short answers, essays, etc.] In these situations, considering why an answer is wrong or insufficient involves more than learning the “correct” answer and requires renewed effort (and learning) on the part of the students.

Allowing revisions and resubmissions may require additional effort on the part of teaching personnel who must continue to grade an assignment over multiple weeks and identify a method for being consistent about grades assigned and feedback provided. This can be challenging in large classes or ones with significant variability in type and quality of allowed responses.

How to Implement

1. Establish rules for HOW work–on-time first attempts, late first attempts, and and revised work–will be submitted.
2. Establish a rubric or mechanism to help create consistency between various deliverables and their grades.
3. Identify if there conditions that must be met before revisions are allowed (Meeting with faculty or a TA, identifying how a submission has been changed, etc.)
4. Clearly explain rules to students.
5. Frequently encourage revisions. [This may be a very new concept to students and they may need to be reminded it is an option].

See Also

Chapter 7. Weighting of Formative vs. Summative activities

Source

Source: Albert Lionelle, Sudipto Ghosh, Marcia Moraes, Tran Winick, and Lindsey Nielsen. 2023. A Flexible Formative/Summative Grading System for Large Courses. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE 2023). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 624–630. https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569810

Described by: Ben Schafer (ben.schafer@uni.edu)

References

None so far.

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