Teaching staff's emphasis on summative assessment

There seems to be a gap between teaching staff's perception of assessment and actual practice. The focus group interviews identified a number of issues that cause a conflict by which staff do not practice assessment in the way that they would like to. These issues were their overall workload, the various policies laid down by the University together with some particular departmental policies, and the conception of what constitutes formative and summative assessment. These issues seem to have a significant influence, and can be used to explain the conflict. They do not affect summative assessment but dictate the extent to which formative assessment is given. These issues are discussed below.

Some teaching staff seem to be confused by the different roles of formative assessment and summative assessment. This reduces the effect of formative feedback in enhancing students' learning during the learning process, and reinforces the deep-rooted grade-orientated mentality found in many students. Another comment was:

"When the students get a grade, it's a feedback." (Teacher, Department G)

This finding matches one of the outstanding features as reviewed by Black and William (1998) in their literature on teaching staff's assessment practices: "That formative assessment is not well understood by teachers and is weak in practice".

In fact, there is a tension that exists between these formative and summative assessment roles (Biggs, 2003; Gipps, 1994; Black & William, 1998). Formative and summative assessment requires teaching staff to play a conflicting role as both a judge and facilitator at the same time. Students tend to focus on the summative grades and marks, which must be provided by teaching staff, and ignore the learning process facilitated by teaching staff's formative feedback.

In addition to the confusion regarding formative and summative assessment, the heavy workload of teaching staff also has an impact on the amount of formative feedback given during an assessment task. This is not uncommon in a university today. In addition to teaching (which includes assessment), teaching staff are required to engage themselves in research work, administrative duties, committee work, consultancy, and the like. This obviously affects the extent to which detailed feedback can be given. Providing detailed and timely feedback is always beneficial for students' learning, but it requires time and effort. A typical comment from a staff member, which conveyed the general feeling was:

"We have so much to do, other than teaching we are required to do research and publish papers, especially if you teach MSc subjects, some academic staff are program leaders and serve on committees. Then we are encouraged to do consultancy work so as to maintain contact with industry and make use of the work that we do in our teaching. There is simply no time to give the formative feedback in a way that you would like to." (Teacher, Department B)

The situation is exacerbated when a member of the teaching staff has large classes of students, where the time and effort for giving feedback and grading will be

"Some of us have large classes: last semester my class had over 240 students, then I was responsible for industrial placements and this consumed a lot of my time. Giving anything other than a grade for such a large class is very time consuming, even though I would like to do it." (Teacher, Department C)

Provision of formative feedback is a very important part in the assessment in the mind of teaching staff. However, at the same time, some teaching staff expressed the view that giving students grades and marks for accountability purposes is also an important part of assessment. Another typical comment was:

"Also, we need to identify who are better and who are not as good. This is a social responsibility. When a student graduates, the University issues a transcript, and the ones with good records would find it easier to find jobs. For employers who have higher requirements, the results reflect a student's ability. This is our social responsibility." (Teacher, Department B)

This matches with the two main purposes of assessment- formative and summative assessment as described by many educators such as Prof. Biggs. Formative assessment refers to feedback provided during learning so that students and teaching staff know how teaching and learning is proceeding and how it can be improved. Whereas summative assessment grades or marks students at the end of a subject and is later used for the award level and classification of the qualification (Biggs, 2003). The above comment also has an interesting connotation. It presumes that students must vary, i.e. there must be good ones, and ones that are not so good. This presumes that they follow a normal distribution curve. The purpose of education, certainly in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University is to produce students that are not normally distributed, but are preferred, and able to excel in their future careers, statistically speaking, there should be a positive skew to the distribution.

مواضيع ذات صلة

The module Ethics in Healthcare

Curricula requirements

Integration what it means

An Integrated Approach to Learning, Teaching and Assessment in a Healthcare Ethics Module

Perspectives of Teachers and Students towards Assessment Conclusions

Norm-referenced assessment (NRA) in teaching staff grading

Grading descriptors

Actual grading practice

Normal distribution grading policy

Criterion referencing assessment (CRA) and norm-referencing (NRA) assessment

Actual assessment practices

Formative and summative assessment