10. Briefing Paper Template - Higher Education Academy

Briefing Paper
dialogue between the instructor and the student, and encourage peer feedback. It was
suggested by delegates, for example, that students might be included in the question
design process, creating their own questions and feedback to share with one another.
There was also some discussion about the most effective way of generating a bank of
formative questions, with associated feedback, as it was recognised that question creation
can be a very time-consuming activity indeed. It was felt that it would be desirable to
develop subject-specific banks of questions to share as an open educational resource
across the sector.
It was also stressed that regular feedback throughout the course is likely to have a greater
impact than a one-off formative assessment, and there was also some discussion about the
desirability of using low-stakes grades for these assessments as a way of engaging students
with the formative tasks. These points were also further developed in the group discussion
task which followed.
After the case studies and the ensuing discussion, there was a group discussion task
around the theme “What are the biggest challenges facing formative e-assessment in the
HE sector”. Delegates broke into small groups of 3-5 participants to identify challenges and
wrote them on post-it notes, then positioned these in order of importance on a flip-chart;
these data were later collated for distribution to the group by email.
The output from the discussion task may be summarised thus:
One key challenge was “what constitutes effective feedback”? Does e-assessment
really improve learning? Some wondered whether it was actually a good idea to
provide a direct link to the correct answer, and others pointed out that there was a
general lack of reading around the subject by students, which needed to be
considered when writing feedback.
Student engagement was identified as a key challenge, especially how to get
students to engage with and reflect upon feedback, online and otherwise. It was
also pointed out that we also need to have mechanisms to encourage discussion
and create dialogue about the feedback. In addition, automated feedback offers
limited support for social learning and we need to maintain the personalised aspect
of feedback to be able to motivate learners in need of support.
There was also discussion of mixed formative/summative assessments, where low
stakes grades are assigned to encourage engagement with feedback, but may raise
concerns about cheating.
Staff and institutional engagement were also identified as key issues: staff can be
reliant on technical specialists, there might be ineffective tools available, and the
technology might be a hurdle. As well as having to learn the specific e-assessment
software, staff also need to develop skills in question design and understanding the
issues related to formative feedback. All of this can be very time consuming,
especially at first. It would help if we could share question banks with other
academics, but this can be a challenge, too.
There was some concern that formative e-assessment may be more relevant in
EvidenceNet is a Higher Education Academy resource.
www.heacademy.ac.uk/evidencenet
Page 6 of 9