6  Assessment

There are two kinds of assessment in the programme:

• (a)  informal assessment - e.g. in-text questions and answers, and self assessment questions (SAQs, where the answers are at the end of the Module) which the students answer to help reinforce their studies and assess their own progress. These assessments are not graded.
• (b)  formal assessment – assignments that are marked and graded by the blended learning tutor with written feedback provided to the student.

Grading formal Tutor Marked Assignments (TMAs) and providing feedback on them is an important part of your role. You can assess whether the student has met the learning outcomes for each study session or Module and can measure the student’s understanding and progress through the curriculum. The student receives encouragement for what has been done well and advice and guidance about how she can improve.

Students need to know the purpose of the assessment, and what learning outcomes will be addressed. Explicit information given in advance of an assignment can help students to understand the purpose of the task and also the value to themselves of engaging with it. With increased understanding comes increased confidence that they will be able to undertake the assignment competently and so they are more likely to be successful.

Each assignment therefore will identify which learning outcomes the students are being assessed on, and an approach to answering the assignment questions so that students are clear about what is being asked of them.

What feedback is useful to students? Feedback that:

• is returned promptly (e.g. at the next study support meeting) while they can still remember what they wrote in the previous assignment
• is supportive and encouraging
• offers more than just corrections – that is, you should respond to good points and ideas in the assignment and say why they are good
• helps them to develop skills they do not yet have, such as structuring an answer or being able to build sound arguments
• suggests how to bring about improvement (for example, ‘you could have referred to a case study to illustrate your point here’)
• helps the student to take forward skills and ideas to the next assignment and beyond
• encourages the student to become more skilled at self-assessment.

Using a positive tone and setting up a ‘dialogue’ in your written feedback is important. If students don’t like reading your comments, they won’t learn anything. A relaxed and personal tone shows you feel involved too, and encourages and creates trust and mutual respect. You can use phrases such as:

Avoid using judgmental language such as

which may be read as accusatory or as questioning credibility.

Instead, you can write things such as:

You should also use phrases that challenge the students, which will help to progress their learning: for example:

A lot of students will be anxious about the thought of writing an assignment, particularly the first one, and many leave it to the last minute to do it and are then short of time. Some students find it difficult to keep focussing on answering the questions and instead write about what they find interesting. You could talk to them about these issues in the first study support meeting. If you do find that they misinterpret the assignment you can show them in feedback how to analyse the questions by adding in some comments about how you would have approached the answer. For some (if not all) students, writing assignments in English will be an added cause of anxiety for them. You will need to be sensitive to this when you are grading their assignments. We suggest that your feedback focuses more on ensuring that each student’s meaning is clear, rather than correcting every spelling mistake or grammatical error where these are not crucial to the delivery of safe and effective health services by the HEW.