Formative and summative assessment should be incorporated into programmes to ensure that the purposes of assessment are adequately addressed and students can learn to engage with assessment effectively.

There should be a good balance of formative and summative assessment across all programmes. This is to ensure that all purposes of assessment, assessment of learning and assessment for learning, and assessment as learning, are adequately addressed.

Formative assessment: has a developmental purpose and is designed to help learners learn more effectively by giving them feedback on their performance and on how it can be improved and/or maintained. Reflective practice by students sometimes contributes to formative assessment.

Summative assessment: is used to indicate the extent of a learner's success in meeting the assessment criteria used to gauge the intended learning outcomes of a module or programme.

All modules should contain elements of formative assessment in order to ensure that students can learn to engage with assessment effectively, and perform to their best ability. It might be appropriate for certain outcomes to be developed over a number of modules before being assessed summatively.

Next >