Assessment for Learning (AfL) is the feedback-based process by which lecturers elicit evidence of students’ learning throughout a session, unit, and course of study via informal evaluation strategies - such as questioning and discussion, online quizzes and polling, and looking at draft work. The checks indicate how well a student, or the cohort of students, is progressing towards the intended learning outcomes, giving the lecturer an insight into how they might adapt their teaching strategies to further support their students to meet these.
AfL and the Bath Blend
Read more about the key design considerations when developing your blended provision for AY 2020/21:
Initial priorities for developing blended provision for 2020/21:
- Start with your ILOs for the course and unit. Each summative assessment should enable students to demonstrate how they meet at least one unit ILO and contribute to at least one course ILO. Outcomes must be met regardless of the blended mode of provision.
- Develop only essential assignments that can be undertaken online. Be realistic about what can be achieved and marked in an online environment.
- Consider technologies. Assessments must be able to be completed using only the technologies students have available.
Also important to consider:
- Identify and make explicit relationships with other assignments. Summative assessments develop knowledge and skills relevant to other units on the course e.g. an essay in year 1 semester 1 will build disciplinary knowledge and skills that can be applied to essays in year 1 semester 2, year 2 semesters 1&2, final year essays, and dissertations. Each summative assessment should also be supported by formative opportunities. These may be formal formative pieces (i.e. practice versions of a similar assignment) or other opportunities e.g. contributing to a seminar provides communication skills relevant to a presentation.
- Design flexibly where possible. Assessments should be accessible to all students. Alternative ways to complete the assessments and meet the relevant intended learning outcomes should be accommodated where DAPs are in place.
- Set expectations. Ensure students and staff have a shared understanding and expectation of what formative feedback will be provided , when this will happen, and how this will help prepare students for specific summative assessment tasks.
Further considerations:
- Provide clear marking criteria. Are your marking criteria suitable for online assessments, consistent across the course or department (as appropriate) and explicit about whether digital skills are being assessed, and if so how? Have you shared the marking criteria with students and can they conceptualise what the criteria mean in practice.
- Provide clear assignment briefs. Be succinct and specific about what students need to do, by when, and in what format.
- Provide support. Make sure students are provided with clear guidance about how to approach the assessment online and that key messages are reinforced every time.
- Signpost to student support resources. Where should students go for advice on relevant skills development? Knowledge and research support? For technical advice? For referencing and avoiding plagiarism guidance? Mental health support and mitigating circumstances?
The benefits of AfL
Using AfL strategies is directly linked to improvements in student performance in summative assessments (Hattie, Invisible Learning, 2009) with students able to learn at approximately double the rate (see Black and William, Inside the Black Box, 2001). AfL is particularly powerful in helping low-achieving students to enhance their learning.
Using AfL strategies encourages learners to recognise that they can reach targets through hard work and active engagement. Learners develop the skills to guide one another, with more able learners progressing through ‘think it, say it, teach it’ (Shimura, MARGE, 2018) and less able learners benefiting from extra guidance. Peer learning also helps to develop professional and transferable skills such as communication, collaboration, and diplomacy.
AfL enables learners to engage in active learning techniques. Students become able to assess themselves and take responsibility for their own learning. Lecturers gain opportunities to reflect on what is going well in their teaching and what can be improved. Lecturers may also have fewer repetitious emails asking for clarification about assignment briefs.
An AfL approach helps create a collaborative learning environment. High-achieving learners often avoid taking risks because they are afraid of making mistakes. Using AfL strategies helps learners and lecturers experiment with new teaching approaches and reduces fear of failure. By collaborating in learning experiences and seeing that failure is a normal part of the learning journey, students realise outcomes can be improved in the future (C. Dweck, Mindset: the New Psychology of Success, 2006).
Adapted from Getting Started with Assessment for Learning, Cambridge Assessment International Education
Making the invisible visible
AfL encompasses acts of transparency around commonly “hidden curricula”, such as:
- sharing intended learning outcomes for sessions, units, and the course of study
- providing assessment journeys (how assignments connect through a course, e.g. essays in years 1 & 2 develop skills for the final year dissertation)
- clear assignment briefs, with opportunities to determine the students’ understanding of these
- sharing and discussing marking criteria with students
- providing action-focused feedback and offering follow-up discussions
By enabling students to share in their lecturers’ understanding of how their curriculum is structured and their learning is assessed, lecturers facilitate their students becoming independent learners able to self-regulate their learning, and help themselves, and their peers, to progress. Effective lecturers embed these informal or 'formative' exercises in 'all aspects of learning and teaching' and common strategies may be 'conducted by different teachers as part of their own diverse and individual teaching styles' (Black et. al., 2003, p.2).
Getting started with AfL
AfL can be conceptualised as a series of questions that are continuously being asked and answered by both lecturer and student throughout a programme of study.
What changes?
The teaching cycle for Assessment for Learning can be conceptualised as a series of iterative engagements between students and lecturers, driven by informal and formal formative, rather than summative, assessments.
A traditional approach to teaching:
An assessment for learning approach to teaching:
The strategies you choose and how you use them may differ depending on the context (e.g. year of study, intended learning outcomes, subject content, class size, available resources, and so on).
Use this self-assessment checklist from Cambridge Assessment International Education to better understand your own current AfL practices.
Four pillars for successful formative assessment
There are four main pillars to successful formative assessment as part of an assessment for learning approach to teaching.
Asking effective questions
Question and answer episodes can be used to check student understanding, either by asking questions of the students or inviting questions from the students, thus eliciting evidence of learning and identifying ongoing knowledge gaps. Examples include:
- Short Q&A discussion sessions in live lecture sessions
- Polling before, during, or after sessions
- Discussions using open questions (live sessions, break-out rooms, forums, chat boxes)
- One-to-one tutorials.
To do it better, try using:
Hinge Questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh5SZZt207k (D. Wiliam, 2016)
The 5 Features of Classroom Talk: https://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/hennessy/all_publications/Howe%20et%20al%20JLS%202019%20accepted%20MS.pdf (Howe, et. al., 2018)
Providing feedback
Verbally or in writing. Feedback should take place constantly and be a two-way or dialogic teaching process (Alexander, 2018) that uses both formal and informal channels. Examples include:
- Pre-submission assignment discussions
- Formal formative or summative assessment scripts
- Post-submission discussions
- Individual, small group, or whole cohort feedback
- Stop/start/continue forms
- OUEs
To do it better, see:
Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment best practice guides (2009-2012): especially the guides on giving feedback for students and lecturers.
Dylan Wiliam’s task-focused Feedback on Learning (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Ox5aoZ4ww&feature=youtu.be
Peer- and self-assessment tasks
Learners need to be able to evaluate their own progress against the shared learning goals and identify actions to improve. They should also be able to provide peer-to-peer support and guidance for one another to develop the skills to become collegiate and collaborative colleagues. However, they will only be able engage in peer and self-assessment tasks if they are clear about what ‘good’ looks like, making a shared understanding of assessment criteria and intended learning outcomes vital.
Examples include:
- Co-creating self-assessment checklists for summative assessments with students
- Students discussing marking criteria and applying to a dummy essay
- Peer-marking other’s work
- Self-marking work
To do it better, see:
Paul Orsmond, Self and Peer Assessment Guidance (2004).
Formative use of summative tests
Summative assessments can be formative too. Planning assessment sequences to show how assessments link to one another throughout a course in terms of developing both subject knowledge and skills is key here.
Examples include:
- Linked to ‘Course-wide approach’, ensure that you know how the knowledge and skills your students develop for you assessment will feed into other assessments in the course e.g. your assessment essays in year 1 can help a learner do better in essays in year 2 and to develop the skills to write a dissertation in the final year.
To do it better, see:
Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment best practice guides (2009-2012): especially the guides on assessment sequences.
Recommended reading and resources
Dylan Wiliam: Embedded Formative Assessment, Solution Tree Press.
A book that goes through the 5 strands of AfL. Searching for Wiliam and Black AfL or ‘Inside the Black Box’ will also point you to lots of resources. Note that this research is focused on school education, but the pedagogy transcends the artificial barriers that sometimes imply that learning approaches are allocated to a specific level of education.
Cambridge Assessment: https://cambridge-community.org.uk/professional-development/gswafl/index.html
A starter for AfL, which includes videos, links and encourages reflection, and offers some ideas. Aimed at schools but can be applied to the HE environment.
John Hattie: Visible Learning https://visible-learning.org/
Lots of information about effect sizes of various classroom approaches, including feedback. Again, mainly from a school context but still applicable to HE contexts.
Phil Race: https://phil-race.co.uk/assessment/
Higher education specific resources/viewpoints. Also ‘The Lecturer’s Toolkit’ book of his is good to dip in and out of as need be.
TESTA: http://testa.ac.uk/index.php/resources/best-practice-guides
Prof Tansy Jessop, now Pro-VC Education at Bristol, worked with the CLT to develop our workshops. Her Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment (TESTA) has similar messages to Dylan Wiliam’s framework.
King’s College AfL page: https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/aflkings/
A comprehensive guide to assessment, with case studies and practical examples.
Carol Evans EAT framework: https://eatframework.org.uk
Free sign-up to access a range of resources aimed at supporting assessment design, feedback and literacy. The aim of this project was to improve students’ ownership of their learning and promote self-regulation.
Naomi Winstone: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/naomi-winstone
Naomi has carried our significant research into effective feedback provision and engaging students with feedback.
What do we mean?
Assessment for Learning (AfL), done well, should enable students to succeed in Assessment of Learning (AoL) and to use assessment as a vital learning tool.
Contact us
Email the Curriculum Development Team to discuss which are most suitable for your discipline and to give you guidance on putting them into practice within your session, unit, year, and course.
Further information
Curriculum Principles
Updated on: 17 June 2020