Enhancing Student Engagement and Feedback Quality through weighted formative assessments in Higher Education

This project explores the integration of formative assessments into a first-year undergraduate course by allocating them a 10% weight toward the final grade. Informed by the University of Bath's Curriculum Transformation, the intervention aims to increase student engagement and provide actionable feedback prior to summative assessments. The pilot, implemented in a Statistics for Economics module, leverages digital tools like Moodle and FeedbackFruits to streamline feedback processes and incorporate peer review. A mixed-method evaluation comparing cohorts from 2023 and 2024 will assess the intervention’s impact on feedback quality, academic performance, and student participation.

We’re testing a new way to help first-year students improve before big exams. In one of their economics classes, we’ve added small graded exercises—worth 10%—that give students early feedback so they know how they’re doing. Instead of more work for teachers, we’re using tools like Moodle to give automatic feedback and get students to review each other’s work. We’ll see how well this works by comparing students this year and next to find out if it helps them learn better and feel more prepared.