ABSTRACT
It is a common saying in education that ‘assessment drives learning’ although it is not clear who first coined the phrase. Perhaps the phrase might be more accurately stated as ‘feedback drives learning’. Indeed, as Hattie and Timperley (2007) note, feedback can improve learning both at school and university level, more than any other factor. Of course, and importantly, feedback and assessment are not the same. In this chapter, I will use the term feedback to mean information given to a student about their learning progress but which does not count towards their grade for their course or module, and assessment to mean the process by which a student’s work is marked and counted towards their final course grade. In which case, there ought perhaps to be a corollary to the first statement above to say ‘assessment also drives drop-out’, at least in distance learning.
