Blurring the boundaries of formative and summative assessment for impact on learning

Encouraging all students to meaningfully engage with feedback on summative assessments is a vexing challenge for educators (Watling, 2016). Using formative feedback techniques as a formal part of a summative assessment allows for a guaranteed ‘feed forward’. Group crits in the form of students and staff viewing their own and others work in an auditorium, are commonly used in the field of Filmmaking for low stakes, formative assessment purposes only. Students often engage in analysis and evaluation of their work in order to hopefully feedforward into their summative assessments. This paper explores using the ‘group crit’ for their actual summative assessment instead of simply as a formative activity. The crit then becomes a vehicle that incorporates valuable staff and peer to peer feedback within the assessment process itself, thereby incorporating low stakes formative assessment, as part of high stakes summative. Using my own teaching of Screen Drama (fiction production involving actors) to first year students I reflect on my practice and conclude with recommendations for tutors to draw from. Key conclusions from this research include that more students engage effectively with this type of feedback and with greater feed forward when it takes place within the summative assessment process itself