Using Formative Assessment to Aid Undergraduate Transition into University

Matthew Hefferan (Assistant Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History), University of Nottingham

One of the most common questions that I receive when teaching first-year history undergraduates is ‘how do university essays differ from A-level ones?’. There is (much to my students’ annoyance) no easy answer to this. For the most part at the University of Nottingham (as is common in many universities), the way that we expect our students to find out is through trial and error: they each spend their first year writing essays (and completing other forms of assessment) on which they receive feedback to help them moving forwards. In some respects, this is what first year is for. After all, the marks they receive in this year do not count towards their overall degree classification. Even so, it struck me a few years ago that there was probably a better way to guide undergraduates into university-level coursework, without relying on trial and error. The solution, I hoped, lay in formative assessment.

We did already have a ‘practice essay’ at Nottingham that students could opt to complete before their first formal piece of coursework, but fewer than 1 in 10 students actually chose to do this. Consequently, I decided it would be better to break up some of the core skills that my students were being assessed on to allow them to practice each of these in isolation. I therefore designed 3 short, targeted formative assessments, which I ran on one of our first-year introductory modules (taking the broadest possible definition of ‘formative assessment’). The tasks were:

1. to create a sample bibliography from a list of information about some primary and secondary sources;
2. to write a 500-word source analysis focusing on one the primary sources covered as part of the seminar programme; and
3. to submit a 500-word essay plan 2 weeks before the summative essay deadline.

I ran these 3 tasks between at the end of semester 1 (i.e., Christmas time), when my students had just submitted their first round of essays, and the end of semester 2 (i.e., Easter time), when their second essays were due. This was so that I could measure progress between the two essays. In total, I was able to get 77 students from my 5 seminar groups to sign up to complete my formative tasks.

The success of these formative assessment tasks can be measured in a number of ways. First, it is clear they were popular with my students. At the end of the academic year, I distributed a survey for my students to complete. Of the 60 students that filled it in, all either ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that the formative assessment tasks were useful and that they would like them to run again in the future. This was compared to just 6 who said that they preferred the existing practice essay. A focus group which I ran reiterated this sentiment. Those who attended this were unanimous that my formative tasks should be rolled out more widely. One (rather pleasingly) even commented that these tasks ‘made it clear how university essays differed from A-level ones’ and allowed them to ‘start building their first university essays piece by piece’ – the very purpose of running them! The impact on my student’s marks backed up the claims of the survey and focus group. The average mark of those who completed the 3 formative assessments rose from 62.1% in the semester 1 essay, to 67.5% in the semester 2 essay – half a grade boundary. By comparison, those who chose not to do the formative assessments received an average mark of 63% for both their semester 1 and 2 essays.

Of course, this is not to say that this scheme was perfect. It came with considerable workload implications for both me and my students, which need to be carefully thought through. There were also several additional tasks (such as the writing of a short book review) that the students in the focus group indicated would be valuable. Thankfully, I will be on research leave in the spring semester of 2025 and I plan to dedicate some of my time then to refining and improving my work in this area, with a view to rolling it out more widely on the history degree at Nottingham in the future.