The Hybridising of Formative and Summative Assessment

Assessment feedback is often problematic in relation to student surveys. The focus of the literature highlights its unhelpfulness, one symptom of which is inconsistency, for example, variability in the type, length, and nature of the feedback. There is, however, less emphasis on the actual purposes of such feedback, which may be another contributing factor to student dissatisfaction. Timing is crucial to the effectiveness of feedback, which often occurs post-assignment when it is too late to effect improvement for the assignment being attempted. The purpose of feedback then, in this framework, would appear to be formative, with the expectation of transformative action by students in later assignments, in which they would use tutor comments on previous work to improve future work in a way unsupported by the literature. The feedback purpose proposed in this paper is to create functional feedback by blending formative and summative assessment strategies to enable students to improve on their current assignment through the provision of specific feedback which addresses three areas of a student’s early work on an assignment to identify: positive trends; areas requiring immediate action; and the use of marker – modelling at the meso - level to demonstrate explicitly how improvements can be made