Principles of good assessment and feedback

Introducing the seven principles

Find out about our seven principles of good learning, teaching and assessment, why they are important and how to apply them.

Why are principles important?

Educational principles are a way of summarising your shared educational values as a college or university. They serve to guide the design of learning teaching and assessment.

A well-thought-out set of principles:

• Describes a shared set of values and a vision
• Summarises and simplifies a lot of research evidence on good pedagogic practice
• Provides a benchmark for monitoring progress
• Serves as a driver for change

Applying the principles

The principles offer an actionable way to improve learning teaching and assessment and can be applied to any aspect of learning design.

There is no one size fits all approach. You need to decide what the principle means in your context and how best to apply it to the learning experience in your organisation. Our self-assessment template (.docx) allows you to adapt the principles to your own context. You can also download the self-assessment template as a pdf.

Do principles change over time?

Principles need to evolve over time if they are to reflect current education research and remain aspirational and a call to action.

The usefulness of educational principles drew widespread attention when Professor David Nicol published a set of principles for good assessment feedback practice as part of the Re-Engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project in 20071.

Principle one - help learners understand what good looks like

Engage learners with the requirements and performance criteria for each task.

Why is this important?

Clarity about criteria

Students undertaking an assessment need to understand what is required of them and the criteria against which their performance will be judged.

This sounds self-evident but many learners find it difficult to derive this information from the available sources such as course and module handbooks. Even where criteria and grade descriptors are provided, they may be couched in academic language that requires some skill to interpret...

The role of feedback

The capacity to recognise and interpret feedback, and use this to lead to further improvement, is key to developing the ability to recognise what good looks like

Feedback provides information about where a learner is in relation to their learning goals so that they can evaluate progress, identify gaps or misconceptions and take action that results in enhanced performance in future.

Putting the principle into practice

Guidance and templates

Sheffield Hallam University makes all of its guidance and templates available via its assessment essentials website.

Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) has developed guidance on assessment grading, criteria and marking (pdf). This helps ensure consistency across the organisation. MMU uses an app to make this information available to students via any mobile device.

The University of Reading's A-Z of assessment methods (pdf) can help you choose an appropriate type of assessment

Adaptive comparative judgement

Assessing a piece of work objectively against a rubric is not easy even for an experienced evaluator.

Comparative judgement works on the principle that people make better judgements if they compare two items, and decide which is better, than if they try to evaluate something in isolation.

Repeated comparison of pairs ultimately allows the items to be rank ordered. This usually takes nine to 12 rounds of comparison.

Principle two - support the personalised needs of learners

Be accessible, inclusive and compassionate.

Why is this important?

There is no such thing as a standard learner. Disability, neurodiversity, cultural and religious background, work and family commitments and personal preference all play a part in shaping our experience of learning.

Moreover, these factors combine to make the learning experience individual. Disabled students are no more a homogenous group than learners that have been bundled together under the unhelpful label BAME (black and minority ethnic)2.

Accessible and inclusive

Good assessment and feedback practice should allow a learner to apply their own individuality to demonstrating their knowledge and competencies.

We are increasingly aware of the need to make assessment accessible ie to ensure that people with disabilities do not face barriers because of the format or tools used. We need to promote similar awareness of the benefits of making it fully inclusive ie fair and equal to all students regardless of their diverse backgrounds...

Some of the ways technology can help

Using digital tools makes it easier to implement universal design for learning (UDL) guidelines by providing multiple channels and options for engagement with learning and assessment activities.

Digital technology offers a vast range of assistive tools that allow learners to respond to the same activity or content in a way that is adapted to their personal needs. Examples include screen readers and braille keyboards for blind students, video and audio captioning for learners with hearing problems, the ability to change font size and colour to support dyslexic students or certain types of visual impairment. Some locked down virtual desktops and third-party tools used for summative assessment do not permit the use of the assistive technologies required by some learners. This is an issue that should be fully investigated before using such tools....

Putting the principle into practice:

• For help with the basics, see our guide to getting started with accessibility and inclusion
• For regular updates see our accessibility blog
• You can also join our accessibility and assistive technology community group
• You can listen to our Beyond the Technology podcast: using AI to support and enhance formative assessment

Making large classes feel small

A decade ago, the University of Sydney was unable to find a tool that could help solve the problem of engaging students with feedback and giving them personal care when cohorts could consist of thousands of students and learners felt lost in the crowd.

They developed a student relationship engagement system (SRES) which integrates with any learning management system using LTI and is now freely available to other universities. SRES is described as a ‘Swiss army knife for instructors’.

Principle three - foster active learning

Recognise that engagement with learning resources, peers and tutors can all offer opportunities for formative development.

Why is this important?

Active learning has been a key tenet of curriculum design and learning space design for several years. Approaches to teaching have evolved in response to evidence that techniques such as lecturing, in contexts where students are passive recipients of information, are highly ineffective.

Building in formative assessment opportunities greatly enhances the effectiveness of learning activities.

The use of quizzes delivered via mobile devices during lectures, is a common example..

Active engagement with learning resources

We tend to think of active learning as something that involves interaction with a teacher or with peers but engagement with learning resources also offers opportunity for learners to evaluate their own understanding.

Interactive questions embedded in online textbooks is an emerging area that has considerable potential for learning enhancement.

Time to revise

An area that receives little attention in learning design is how students prepare themselves for summative assessment. What revision strategies do they employ and what resources do they use?

Some of the ways technology can help

The use of quizzes delivered via mobile devices during lectures, is a well-known example of formative testing. It can be used to check whether most students have grasped key concepts and allow the lecturer to adapt the session if further explanation is required.

Putting the principle into practice

The Doer Effect

Research from Carnegie Mellon University suggests a causal relationship between students doing practice questions while reading and enhanced learning outcomes. This phenomenon, known as the ‘doer effect’ has been replicated in very large-scale studies in other US universities3. The studies show that formative practice enhances the learning effect by a factor of six compared to simple reading of the text.

The research findings are very clear. The main factor inhibiting embedding such practice questions in every online textbook is the work needed to generate the questions. A textbook for a semester long module may require hundreds or thousands of questions requiring both subject matter and question item authoring expertise.

Interactive presentation

Universities using Feedback Fruits software have access to a tool known as interactive presentation. The tutor can upload video content, such as a pre-recorded lecture, and lock specific moments in the timeline with practice questions.

Students have to answer these questions before they can continue to watch the rest of the video.

The teacher has access to an analytics dashboard to see which questions students struggle with.

Synote

Synote is an award-winning, open source application developed at the University of Southampton that makes video resources easier to access, search, manage and exploit.

Imagine trying to use a textbook that has no contents page, index or page numbers. Lengthy video recordings, such as recorded lectures, can be equally difficult for students to navigate.

Synote allows students to bookmark particular sections of a recording and associate their notes with the correct section. Students can also take live notes during lectures, using Twitter, on any mobile device then upload them into Synote so they can be synchronised with a recording of the lecture5.

Principle four - develop autonomous learners

Encourage self-generated feedback, self-regulation, reflection, dialogue and peer review.

Why is this important?

It is often said that one reason students tend to express a relatively high level of satisfaction with lectures, is the fact that they don’t need to do anything during a lecture.

The remark is not entirely tongue-in-cheek. Tutors frequently complain that students see themselves as passive recipients of learning content. Similarly, in relation to assessment, some learners view it as the tutor’s role to deliver feedback to them.

Developing students’ ability to self-regulate and manage their own learning is a key goal of effective learning and assessment design. We also touch on this in relation to principle number one help learners understand what good looks like and principle number three foster active learning.

The power of comparison

Many studies have observed that students appear to learn more from generating feedback for their peers than they do from engaging with peer feedback comments provided for them.

Research by Professor David Nicol, at the University of Glasgow, suggests this is because when students review their peers’ work, after producing their own, they make comparisons of the peer’s work with their own and this activates powerful internal feedback. Such comparisons can generate valuable learning whether the work of the peer is stronger or weaker than the reviewer’s own.

Self-paced learning

Most educators recognise the importance of developing learners’ capacity to self-regulate and the role that engagement with feedback plays in this. Our efforts in this area are however, sometimes at odds with a fixed regime of content delivery via lectures and a rigid assessment schedule. Inevitably, some learners struggle to keep up whilst others are insufficiently challenged.

Higher education could do more to encourage self-pacing within bounded limits, such as an individual module. Students could be allowed to test their knowledge when they feel ready and resubmit until they have mastered a topic.

There may be lessons to be learned in this area from the school sector. The modern classroom project suggests the following classification of learning and assessment activities:

Some of the ways technology can help

Early attempts to implement peer review found it could be time consuming to administer. Digital tools make it possible to implement peer review activities at scale.

Features such as allocation of reviews, linking to assessment criteria, managing anonymity and tracking which students have completed the work, are all easier in the digital environment.

Use of the open standard LTI means that tools supporting self, peer and group review can be seamlessly integrated into the learning management system.

Two stage examinations

It is not unusual for a learner to walk out of a formal examination and immediately think of something they should have done differently. Normally it’s too late but what if you had the chance to put it right?

Research by Professor David Nicol and colleagues at the University of Glasgow has taken this idea step further and researched the impact of a two-stage examination structure3.

In their model a student takes an exam and then completes reflective questions to surface their internal feedback about their performance. They are asked to identify any weaknesses they are aware of and any aspects of their work on which they would like to have expert feedback.

The students then take the same exam again but this time working in groups...

Principle five - manage staff and learner workload effectively

Have the right assessment, at the right time, supported by efficient business processes.

Why is this important?

We need to ensure we are assessing the things that matter and doing so in a way that allows the student learning from each assignment to feed forward into future tasks.

Common problems to avoid are over-assessment and assessment bunching.

A programme of study is likely to be broken down into smaller modules. Each module will have its own learning outcomes and there may be overlap between them. If each module team designs its own assessment without reference to the overall picture, you may find that some learning outcomes are assessed multiple times and that assignments are ‘bunched’ at particular times of year...

Some of the ways technology can help

Understanding the curriculum

A description of the curriculum in digital format can allow you to get an overview using only basic analysis, such as number and type of assignments per module, to see where some learners may be being over assessed.

A similar overview of assessment dates will reveal assignment bunching.

Personalising information

Many institutions now use apps that provide students with a personalised overview of administrative information such as timetable, assignment due dates etc that can help them manage their workload better.

For staff, it is increasingly common to have a personalised dashboard view showing the status of assignment tasks and their priority.

Workload management

Online workflows make it easier to manage team marking across large cohorts.

Digital feedback tools offer the possibility to reuse/adapt frequent comments to save tutors time.

Digital tools offer possibilities to generate and mark questions for both formative and summative development. The type of questions that can be created and automatically marked using the QTI (question test interoperability) open standard go far beyond basic multiple-choice and can include evaluation of what higher-order skills learners are using to come up with their answer.

Putting the principle into practice

Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment (TESTA)

TESTA has produced guidance on revised assessment patterns that work.

The University of Greenwich map my assessment tool helps with planning, identifying clashes and modelling the consequences of change. The tool is available for others to use.

One-stop-shop EMA (electronic management of assessment) solution at the University of Wolverhampton

The University of Wolverhampton used the Jisc assessment and feedback life-cycle to help its analysis and planning to create an end to end solution for EMA (electronic management of assessment).

This ‘one-stop shop’ is built around the core tools of the Canvas learning management system and Turnitin academic integrity solution. The Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) open standard is used to facilitate seamless interoperability throughout the workflow.

An assessment centre provides staff with an overview of all assessment tasks in their courses.

Timely feedback for large classes

The University of Utrecht department of law faces a ‘massiveness’ problem.

The department has 800 new students each year and the current learning design requires them to complete an essay each week. Feedback and grades must be returned within three days in order to feed into the next assignment.

This has to be managed with a team of two professors and 25 ‘correctors’ who provide feedback. The correctors are a combination of assistant professors, teaching assistants and third-year students.

Principle six - foster a motivated learning community

Involve students in decision-making and support staff to critique and develop their own practice.

Why is this important?

"Feeling connected and valued really helps to improve learning as well as engagement."
Danny Liu, University of Sydney

"Principles that foster human connection are vital. How we develop relationships and maintain connections with and between peers, have become vital questions. Creating a sense of belonging in the virtual classroom has far reaching effects."
Ewoud de Kok, FeedbackFruits

"Collaboration is at its best when students truly believe they will have a greater chance of achieving their academic goals by working with peers."
Kareem Farah, the modern classrooms project

This ties in with principle number two support the personalised needs of learners. Involving students in discussions around assessment practice helps make it more inclusive and allows students who may face barriers, for example, due to a disability, to voice their concerns.

Assessment literacy

Institutions commonly focus on developing learners’ study skills, graduate attributes and digital literacies but none of these fully addresses student understanding of, and engagement in, the assessment process.

Study skills resources tend to help students develop their assessment ‘technique’ through essay writing, presentation and preparing for exams rather than understanding the nature and purpose of assessment and feedback practice.

Engaging students as active participants in making academic judgement develops their assessment literacy and gives assessment a sense of purpose which is motivating.

Developing academic practice

It is just as important for staff to reflect on their assessment and feedback practice as it is for students to strive to improve their own performance.

New findings from education research and advances in technology may offer improved ways of implementing good practice even if the underlying pedagogy is still sound.

"We didn’t need to do anything different but we did need to do things differently." 
Elizabeth Hidson, University of Sunderland

Course and module teams may spend a lot of time discussing approaches at the curriculum design stage only for assessment and feedback to be left to personal choice.

Putting the principle into practice

Find out more about our change agent network supporting student staff partnerships across the UK.

University College London (UCL) is one of the active participants in the network. The University has established a central team of digital assessment advisors and runs ‘assessment mythbusting’ town hall events and assessment ‘hackathons’. UCL also has appointed a group of student assessment design advisors to help develop and pilot new forms of assessment. Find out more about UCL's partnership approach to assessment transformation.

Assessing the process of thinking

We tend to focus on immediate peers when we talk about learning communities but academic development is also taking place at scale. Across France open standards and data science are being applied to improve assessment practice.

The French ministry of education uses digital technology to develop more authentic ways to measure traditional competencies and 21st-century skills.

These assessments don’t only provide information about whether the answer is correct. They capture a rich set of data that reveal the students’ thought processes.

Solving problems in mathematics and science requires students to use cross-curricular skills such as calculating, modelling, and scientific reasoning. Until recently, it has been difficult to measure these skills because traditional math and science assessments contain test items that are scored, based on a student’s final answer.

Principle seven - promote learner employability

Assess authentic tasks and promote ethical conduct.

Why is this important?

Our thinking is influenced by Dr Yong Zhao. He suggests education, rather than trying to fix perceived ‘deficits’, by measuring against prescribed standards, should be cultivating individual strengths1.

Employability, viewed from this perspective, can be seen as the ability to translate your uniqueness into value for others.

If higher education is to remain relevant in a changing world, it needs to demonstrate that our learning and assessment practices prepare people for the world of work and participation in democratic society.

Authentic assessment

There are frequent calls for assessment to become more ‘authentic’. By this we mean that the tasks which are assessed should reflect things the learner may have to do in real life.

Traditional assessment formats, such as essays or exams, don’t really mirror any other real-world situations.

Authentic assessment doesn’t only apply in subjects we traditionally think of as ‘vocational’. The skills we can test using formats such as closed book exams, which rely heavily on recall, are an equally poor fit with the working practices of academics or researchers of the future.

Authentic tasks are more likely to focus on deeper learning and the learner’s ability to apply their knowledge and skills. Give the learner some agency in deciding the topic and medium to be assessed, and you are moving towards the ideal of creating value from individual uniqueness.

Promoting ethical conduct

Academic misconduct features high amongst institutional concerns about assessment practice.

There is a perception that cheating and collusion are easier in the digital environment. However, such practices are generally only possible where the assessed task lends itself to finding an answer ready prepared. This is especially true now that the practice of purchasing an assignment written to order by an ‘essay mill’ has been outlawed.

Not only is it harder to cheat at authentic tasks, they provide a sound foundation for a discussion of ethical practice. Academic writing and referencing can appear arcane whereas giving credit to the work of others in the world of business is a more familiar concept to introduce an understanding of ethics.

The University of Exeter has created guidance on designing work integrated assessment.

This is a topic that cuts across a number of our principles:

• Principle number one, help learners understand what good looks like is relevant. Student engagement with the performance criteria can help develop an understanding of the importance of acknowledging source material and intellectual property rights.
• Principle number five, manage staff and learner workload effectively is important as pressure of over assessment can be a reason why students cheat2.

Some of the ways technology can help

Student employability is enhanced by familiarity with the kind of digital tools in day-to-day use in the business environment.

Use of digital tools allows learners to access and incorporate material from a wide range of sources and to present their outputs using a range of formats and media.

Digital tools can make it easier to simulate real-world scenarios to which students can respond. This can range from video examples to much more elaborate simulation tools.

Digital records of learning outcomes can produce richer evidence of student achievement. Open badges and micro-credentials can sit alongside more traditional formal qualifications.

Putting the principle into practice

Our employability toolkit is a good starting point to find guidance and examples.

Policing a virtual shopping centre

The University of Northampton is using online scenarios to replace in-person training exercises for apprentice police officers. Videos of alleged robbery, shoplifting and suspicious activity in a shopping centre are accessed via the virtual learning environment (VLE).

Student responses to the scenarios are discussed in group webinar sessions which means that, for the first time, the whole class can learn from the experience.

The University has also created a mock courtroom scenario. Police apprentices present statements and are cross examined by two criminal barristers representing the defence and the prosecution3.

Group member evaluation

In the world of work, overall team performance is as much a part of recognition and reward strategy as individual performance. Assessing a learner’s contribution to group work is thus a very authentic scenario but fraught with difficulty.

At Maastricht University in the Netherlands, students in the department of data science and knowledge engineering experience authentic learning and assessment from the start of their course. The department has a philosophy of problem-based and project centred learning. Students work in groups of six to seven to solve real-world problems.

The issues that arise will be familiar to anyone who has tried group learning. Students complain that some of them work harder than others with some students failing to complete tasks or handing work in late.

It can be hard for tutors to get to the bottom of the issues as some of the complaints are contradictory. Often, they don’t hear about the issues until a deadline is approaching by which point it is too late to intervene and improve the group dynamic.

The solution to the problem was to implement group member peer evaluation at a point when the group has had time to settle down but there is still time for the initiative to result in improvement.

Group member evaluation is done anonymously using a tool designed by FeedbackFruits4 in collaboration with a group of universities. The tool is integrated into the learning management system via LTI.

Learners have to evaluate themselves before they assess other group members. They then look at how their self-evaluation matches that of their peers and have the opportunity to discuss this with their tutor.

The economics of panic buying

At Stirling University an economics exam involving ‘doing the calculations by hand, from memory, in a cold sterile environment’ has been replaced by real-world problems requiring flexibility and creativity to address the issues.

First year students in 2020 were required to design strategic interactions to address the pandemic. Topics ranged from panic buying, hoarding and price gouging to vaccine uptake and sharing. Students were free to use their own choice of medium including blog posts, digital posters and videos5.

The boss wants an answer by the end of the day

The environmental science department at Brunel University London replaced a three-hour exam with a more authentic task. Students were confronted with what it feels like to turn up for work one morning and find your boss needs a report on a complex matter by the end of the day.

The assessed task was a complex question drawing on a wide range of information encountered during the course. The students had to demonstrate their working and provide references with highlighted annotations. They had seven hours to tackle the problem.

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