Academic development through design: An example
of learning to improve formative feedback

The need to improve the quality of assessment practices continues to be a major area of concern in higher education. Feedback on university teaching regularly indicates a need to improve assessment strategies. However, take up of different assessment strategies has been slow due to a lack of local examples, poor understanding of assessment principles and regulatory procedures that can make change bureaucratic. This paper describes the process by which a group of academics attempted to improve student learning by improving assessment in their institutions. Given the importance of formative assessment to student learning, the focus of the innovation was to provide more students with high quality feedback.

This paper discusses the process of creating a cross-institution development team to learn about effective methods of providing formative feedback to students. A collaborative learning approach was adopted to include all stakeholders in the development of a solution to this educational problem. Collaborative design is frequently used in software development but has only rarely been applied in educational innovation. After learning about formative feedback each of the team members acted as team leaders to adapt and assist others to adapt the designed processes for providing formative feedback to their own university.