THE WORLD CAFÉ IN PRACTICE
Formative assessment and feedback
I was puzzled by low submission rates for formative assessment. It gives students a valuable opportunity to test their knowledge and skills before the summative assessment, so why were so many choosing not to do it? I assumed that students were busy and reluctant to spend time on work that did not count towards their final mark.
The World Café showed me that the problem was more complicated and far more human. Working with students, I redesigned the approach to provide greater support while they were completing the work and to make the feedback feel worth the effort.
THE PROBLEM
What wasn't working?
Formative assessment was not working in my first-year module. Four things told me that.
Submission rate
Fewer than one-third of the 400-plus students submitted a formative answer each year.
Submission quality
Most of the work submitted was incomplete or was a variation of the task I had set. Instead of full answers, I received bullet points, descriptions of the relevant law, notes towards a possible answer or a single paragraph. These attempts did not give me enough evidence of students’ developing skills to provide the meaningful feedback they needed.
Engagement with feedback
Many of the students who did submit never accessed their feedback. The work had been completed and marked, but the opportunity for learning was lost.
Summative issues
I could see problems appearing in summative answers that might have been identified and addressed through a meaningful attempt at the formative task.
I tried some apparently sensible solutions. I moved the submission deadline to avoid clashes with other modules. I also made the relationship between the formative and summative assessments explicit so that students could see the value of completing the work. Neither change made much difference.
THE CONVERSATION
What did I ask students?
Why weren’t students completing formative assessment? I genuinely couldn’t understand it.
From my side of the desk, formative assessment was a low-stakes opportunity to practise problem-solving skills and receive feedback before the summative assessment. The mark didn’t count, so students could make mistakes without damaging their final result.
So why weren’t they doing it?
I used the World Café to understand what completing formative assessment felt like from their side of the desk, what was preventing them from engaging fully and what we might do differently.
Using the problem → perfect solution → realistic solution model that I developed for working with students, I used three questions to guide the conversation:
“You called it ‘low stakes’ like it’s less difficult or less stressful in some way but it isn’t … we go through the same struggles of self-doubt, uncertainty and panic for formative assessment.”
“I’m not lazy or disengaged. I’m lost and overwhelmed.”
“I wish we could ask questions and get help when we’re doing it. Not make mistakes and find out later.”
“A lot of markers put effort into feedback but a lot don’t and you’ve got no way of knowing in advance if all your work is going to be worth it.”
WHAT CHANGED?
What did I do differently?
The great strength of using the World Café with students is that it does more than uncover problems. It draws on students’ experience and wisdom to help find possible solutions.
Knowing that the formative task needed to feel more manageable and that the feedback needed to feel worth the effort was only the beginning. I also needed students’ help to understand what practical changes might make those things happen.
Make the route visible
A very simple first step involved making the route towards the assessment much more visible. Every lecture, tutorial and piece of reading was explicitly connected to the knowledge or skills students would need for the formative and summative assessments. I wanted them to see that assessment preparation was not something that suddenly began when the question appeared. They had been preparing for it from the very start of the module.
Work through the criteria together
Before students started to tackle the formative assessment, we worked through the assessment criteria together. We talked about what each criterion actually meant, what it might look like in an answer and how students could tell whether their work was meeting it. This also gave them a chance to ask questions before uncertainty had time to become panic.
Create a formative buffet
I then created what I called the formative buffet. Rather than offering one substantial task on one fixed date, I released three questions of different lengths and levels of complexity, with some flexibility about when students completed them.
The name was playful, but the purpose was serious. I wanted students to be able to choose a task that felt possible while still giving them a meaningful opportunity to practise.
Put support where the work happens
To ensure that the students had more support while they were writing their formative assessment, I created a collection of very short video guides that broke the process into manageable pieces. The first dealt simply with how to analyse the question. Students could use the videos whenever they became stuck, including those who might not feel comfortable asking for help in person.
I was really mindful of not wanting all the support to sit in resources that students had to navigate alone. I wanted to create a sense that we were working together towards a common goal so I started an anonymous discussion board where they could ask questions while working and arranged supervised writing sessions where help was available in the room.
The writing sessions were very simple but incredibly popular and effective. We spent the first part discussing the task and answering questions. Then students wrote. I stayed in the room, and whenever somebody became stuck or uncertain, they could ask for help.
Formative assessment became an experience of supported learning rather than a task in which students struggled alone until submission and discovered afterwards that they had misunderstood something. They could test an idea, ask a question and find a way forward while the work was still taking shape.
Students had also been very clear that if they invested academic and emotional effort in producing an answer, they wanted feedback that felt like the effort was worthwhile and that answered the important questions:
So I created a feedback menu: an ideal accompaniment to the formative buffet! Students could choose between:
This was not about matching feedback to supposed “learning styles”. It was about giving students some choice over how they received it and creating better opportunities for meaningful feedback.
Taken together, the changes altered when support happened. Instead of setting the task, waiting for students to submit and then explaining what had gone wrong, I moved much more of the support into the period when students were actually trying to create the work.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
What difference did it make?
Returning to the first three of these showed something substantial had changed:
The clearest change was in participation. Previously, fewer than a third of the cohort had submitted formative work but this increased to slightly more than three-quarters following the redesign.
The nature of the submissions changed too. No more plans, bullet points and partial responses. Every piece of work was a complete attempt at the question. Students weren’t just submitting more work; they were engaging in a more meaningful way with the learning opportunity.
Every student who submitted accessed their feedback, and some asked for follow-up conversations. A number revised their answers in response to what they had learned and returned for further feedback. This was especially encouraging because it showed feedback becoming part of an ongoing learning process rather than the final word on a finished piece of work.
Students’ responses suggested that the experience felt different too. They particularly valued having a choice of formative task, receiving support while they were writing and being able to choose how their feedback was delivered.
A quarter (just under a hundred) of students made no attempt at formative assessment.
The pass rate in the module remained unchanged.
Students who had not attempted the formative assessment were heavily represented in the fails and lower marks. By contrast, no student who completed the formative assessment failed and only three received third-class marks. The pattern of marks had shifted upwards overall. More students were doing better work.
It would be tempting to claim this as a success for the redesigned approach but the results do not establish that completing the formative assessment caused the stronger performance. There may be other explanations. Students who chose to engage with the formative opportunities may have differed in important ways from those who did not and it may be that students who were prepared to tackle the formative were the ones who would always have performed well in the summative assessment in any case.
But what can be said is that the changes made formative assessment more accessible, meaningful and useful for a great many students. What the changes did not do was reach all students and it seems likely that they failed to reach the students who needed them the most.
DISSEMINATION
Where the work has travelled
I have shared the project and its findings within Surrey Law School and more widely through Advance HE and presentations to legal educators: