Does Blackboard based formative assessment and feedback work?
Drawing on work in progress this paper will discuss whether Blackboard based formative assessment and feedback in the Social Sciences fulfils the aim of improving the student learning experience. Using early findings from student focus groups on a variety of Social Science modules the paper will discuss the main issues around student perceptions of what is formative assessment and how useful this is to their learning. It will show that some students remain sceptical about the benefits of formative assessment although in other cases that feedback from formative assessment has enabled students to improve their summatively assessed work. An additional finding of this research relates specifically to the use of Bb’s assessment tools and the ability of the teaching teams to provide useful and timely feedback to students at the point of taking the assessment.
