Enhancing assessment and feedback with technology: a guide for FE and skills

Background

Colleges and training providers across the UK are looking to technology to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility of their assessment and feedback practice.

Many are keen to innovate, prompted by learners’ expectations of online submission and feedback and more flexible, relevant modes of assessment. Others are finding quality and efficiency gains from integrated systems. And both teachers and learners benefit from feedback that is timely, interactive and retrievable

In a digital age, it is important to take advantage of what technology can bring to assessment and feedback.

Why technology?

Our assessment and feedback lifecycle model captures the elements or stages across any assessment or feedback activity, from a short quiz to a final assignment.

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The assessment and feedback life cycle

©This diagram was based on the original by Manchester Metropolitan University

All rights reserved

You can find out more about each stage, and how technology can help, in our detailed guide where you can read an overview as well as explore individual areas of the lifecycle.

Teachers and trainers often innovate with technology at the 'supporting' stage of the cycle, for example in formative assessment. However, technology offers equal benefits in the management of assessment: our pages on submission, marking and production of feedback explain more.

Defining terms

Key to our understanding of technology-enhanced assessment and feedback is that it extends or adds value to the strategies, processes, procedures and systems used throughout the assessment life cycle.

So we use the term technology-enhanced assessment and feedback in this guide rather than e-assessment (which can sometimes be understood as onscreen testing) to highlight that technology can add value to assessment and feedback in many different ways.

You may also want to know more about electronic management of assessment (EMA). EMA refers to technology used to support the electronic submission, assessment of, and feedback on, assignments. Find out more from our introductory guide to EMA.

Issues for FE and skills

Further education (FE) and skills covers a wide range of courses and qualifications with markedly different cultures and approaches to assessment and feedback.

Our e-assessment survey report (pdf) published in May 2016 researched use of e-testing, technology-supported formative assessment, e-portfolios and tracking systems across the sector. From this, we know most FE and skills organisations are using technology in assessment on a day-to-day basis, but the impact is limited.

Only just over half (56%) of organisations have a strategy for technology-enhanced assessment. This makes widespread adoption of technology-supported assessment harder to achieve.

57% have had a good or very good experience of e-assessment but the digital capabilities of teachers and learners were still a barrier.

Financial constraints and time for training and support are also concerns. So too are cultural issues; let’s face it, it’s often easier to stay as you are than make changes to something as important as assessment.

Nonetheless, where technology is combined with support and training for staff, assessors and learners, organisations report significant transformative benefits. These benefits need to be shared more widely.

A changing sector

Produced in conjunction with our FELTAG partners, our 2016 report on the evolution of FELTAG, captures a picture of a sector in the process of change.

A range of technologies in assessment-for-learning strategies are clearly making an impact. An example is screencast feedback, which is proving more efficient and effective than traditional methods:

“Evidence so far shows that this takes tutors no more time than traditional written feedback but offers the opportunity for richer, more dialogue-driven comment.”
Developing screen casting as a tool for formative and summative feedback (pdf) Oldham College (with Edge Hill University)

Equally, training providers are finding benefits in e-portfolios, such as tracking learners’ progress and flexibility over when and where assessment takes place:

“80% of those currently using e-portfolios said they give them greater visibility of student progress... 69% found being able to work in more places a key benefit.”
City and Guilds' survey of training provider organisations (2015) (pdf)

Many organisations find they can improve the learner’s experience through technology, especially the timely feedback provided by e-testing:

“The students achieve and have a good experience. They particularly like assessments that have immediate results.”
Examination administrator, large FE college

Nonetheless, over half of respondents felt their organisation’s staff lacked digital literacy, and a similar number in the 2015 City and Guilds training provider survey (pdf) spoke of the need for training in e-portfolios.

Podcast

Listen to our interview with Jayne Holt, assistant principal for learning services from Walsall College, on how they are using technology to meet challenges and provide a quality experience for their learners.

• Download the podcast (mp3)
• Read the transcript (pdf)

Moving forward

With many organisations in our survey (pdf) expecting to increase technology-enhanced assessment and feedback by 2020, it is vital to know how to use it well.

Bringing teachers and learners together to work on digital literacy is a great way to start. Our research tells us that learners need assessment literacy (ie understanding of, and engagement with, the purpose of assessment) as well as digital literacy. Working together can help learners understand assessment processes better and enable teachers to see assessment from the learner’s perspective.

Organisational gains

Our research shows there are distinct gains from integrating EMA systems. These include:

• Savings in administrative time and costs
• Avoidance of duplication
• Improved transparency for learners
• Effective tracking of learners’ progress across different locations, increasing the potential for improved results
• Faster response to issues

In the section on learning analytics, our guide to EMA explains how the data collected in EMA systems can help you spot learners in need of support.

Some organisations have invested in bespoke systems. Larger colleges working with many different awarding and accrediting organisations are more likely to need to develop their own in-house solutions.

Establishing 'digital-as-the-norm' can also be key to changing an organisation’s practice.

Further resources to help you

• Our guide to changing assessment and feedback practice offers strategies for engaging and supporting staff through change
• Examples of good practice from an awarding organisation: CCEA case studies of innovative practices for teaching and assessment in NIFE

Teaching and training gains

In a fast-changing world, teachers and trainers with knowledge and experience of technology are better placed to respond to curriculum change. Using digital tools in their own continuing professional development (CPD) can give staff a head start. Watch our video on CPD with e-portfolios at Thanet College.

With increasing pressures on their time, teachers and trainers have found new technologies both efficient and effective when it comes to developing and assessing learners’ skills. Here are some examples:

Effective use of cloud services and storage for e-portfolios can also prove beneficial for learners and teachers with time constraints. This benefit is felt particularly in work-based learning and apprenticeships.

Social media can prompt a richer dialogue around developing work while also improving learners’ employability. Learners using blogging and networking tools, for example, can obtain feedback from experts and potential employers through online links to their work.

Online assessments can be more accessible for learners and cost-effective for organisations (although accommodating large groups of learners can be problematic). Those benefitting especially are learners in dispersed workplace environments. However, the potential is greater than is often realised; don’t just assume e-testing means multiple choice questions, as the BTL and City and Guilds case study (pdf) on functional skills reveals.

Further resources to help you

• Our guide to feedback and feed forward covers a range of ways in which technology can transform feedback
• Our guide to making assessments accessible explains how to ensure assessment design and e-testing provision is inclusive
• Our guide to assessment, feedback and submission with mobile devices has case studies on assessment with mobiles
• Our showcase contains a range of case studies from Scotland
• Read more: Case studies of good practice from the Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning (CAVTL), Ofsted, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, and the Institute of Education

Learner gains

For most learners, technology-enhanced assessment and feedback offer more benefits than challenges. However, some learners lack confidence in using technology in assessment and many more lack understanding of how to use technology effectively to evidence their learning. Improving the digital capabilities and literacies of learners remains a high priority for FE and skills providers. Our detailed guide provides models, ideas and resources.

Many would argue it’s in the rich variety of assessment-for-learning techniques that technology really comes into its own. By using quizzes, apps, online polling tools, and by capturing digital evidence in the form of audio, video and image files, learners gain control over their own learning and are motivated to work independently.

Using e-portfolios, learners can assemble their own evidence against assessment criteria, providing assessors and employers with a richer picture of who they are, and what they can do. Selecting and presenting evidence for e-portfolios brings in additional skills of communication, presentation, evaluation and decision-making, all of which add value to learners’ employability.

Further resources to help you

• Our guide assessment for learning: a tool for benchmarking your practice in FE and skills is a hands-on tool to help you to self-assess your assessment practices
• Our short guide to getting started with e-portfolios explains how this technology can do more than record achievements
• Our guide, how to enhance student learning, progression and employability with e-portfolios, explores the learner perspective on e-portfolios in FE as well as HE

Looking forward

We continue to support our partners in the FELTAG coalition to advance the use of technology in learning, teaching and assessment. Please contact your Jisc account manager or senior co-design manager Lisa Gray lisa.gray@jisc.ac.uk to share your examples of effective practice.