It’s breaking my heart: Lack of time for formative assessment

A recent paper in Higher Education argues that assessment practice is in a state of arrythmia, a convulsing situation that has teachers and students operating under compressed time constraints, far from optimal conditions for formative assessment opportunities. Setting and grading evaluation tasks is part of any teacher’s duties, and teachers of course need to determine the extent to which their students have achieved stated learning goals. But assessments are taking place too often and with too little time in between. In their article, authors Winstone and Gravett discuss the fragmented, erratic nature of assessment practices. Using the metaphor of arrythmia (an irregular heartbeat), they outline how compressed submission deadlines and grading targets limit learning opportunities in university contexts that prioritize efficiency and productivity metrics. Calmer and more natural rhythms that provide more conducive conditions for meaningful learning can be left behind in this emphasis on academic output. We and our students hop from one examination to the next with too little time for feedback, reflection and learning. Because of this rapid pace, say the authors, we need pedagogic defibrillation to reconnect with temporal rhythms that can accommodate formative assessment opportunities and get back to a normal, consistent, healthy pulse.

Many of us recognize that assessments are typically categorized as summative or formative. The former provides a judgement, a grade on how well a student has met learning goals. Summative assessment may or may not involve feedback explaining an assigned grade but does not necessarily provide support for future learning. The latter, in contrast, is intended as a pedagogic tool to help students build on their current knowledge levels and abilities. Formative assessment comes with an expectation (either explicit or implied) that there will be opportunities for students to implement or apply feedback applied by the teacher. Those opportunities are not priorities in summative examination. Formative assessment demands time and space, both for teachers to consider and express advice tailored to each student’s needs and for students to digest, reflect on, and apply that feedback at upcoming learning opportunities. Such time, however, is in short supply in current university assessment practices, leading to arrythmia, the rapid beating of a metaphorical heart that is out of sync with natural rhythms of learning.

So, how did this arrythmia start? And what are the symptoms? In their article, Winstone and Gravett point out that strict adherence to institutional workload clocks and productivity metrics overwhelm the natural temporal space needed for giving and making use of formative input. The authors examine this problem from the perspective of Lefebvre’s notion of rhythmanalysis to ponder educational time. The result: the current state of time in relation to assessment practices in higher education needs defibrillation to recover. Students express dissatisfaction with untimely feedback from teachers that comes too late to implement. They face an unrelenting stream of disjointed assessment tasks that seek to judge knowledge rather than stimulate its growth. This stream is viewed as a series of checkpoints in quick succession, where students aim to survive rather than thrive. For teachers, university policies regarding speed of feedback comments boil the practice down to ratios (think 10—15 minutes allocated for each student paper). When one set of marking gets done, the next batch is waiting.

This perspective of constant productivity on both sides of the teacher-student relationship signals an educational heart beating out of whack with “the lived rhythms of academic and work and learning” (p. 3). This means that conditions for formative assessment are not being met. Under clock pressure, teachers lack the flexibility to dedicate sufficient time to address individual student needs through formative feedback. Time in the institutional sense is not compatible with time in the individual sense. The authors emphasize that institutional time treats everyone the same; yet, student time is idiosyncratic, reflecting individual circumstances. Thus, their feedback uptake varies as well, making it out of sync with compressed university timelines that move swiftly from assessment to assessment, module to module, course to course. This is where the pedagogic point of the article comes in. Temporal distance, the authors argue, is needed following task submission to allow for emotional recovery and cognitive reflection for students before the next evaluation. Spaces for formative learning, uncertainty and consolidation are currently missing, leading to this arrythmia.

Winstone and Gravett want to relieve this arrythmia and take us back to a more settled and natural pace. The answer to the problem, in their view, is pedagogic defibrillation. This can help put the ‘heart’ of education back in to balance and allow for rhythms in higher education to accommodate the lived rhythms of the people involved. Instead of overemphasizing regular salvos of summative assessment, better spaced assessments that create formative uptake opportunities are needed.

The authors provide three recommendations for restoring a more sustainable rhythm. The first is at the individual course level which involves evidence of learning collected through a portfolio-based collection and extended assessment arcs rather than a high number of discrete tasks. Under this suggestion, submission windows rather than strict single deadlines would allow for temporal accommodation of student rhythms. The second idea is at the module level across entire programs. Rather than summative assessment at the end of each module, formative assessments can be spread across a period of learning, culminating in a single summative assessment that draws on content from each module, positioned at the end of the course. Doing this would allow for content to be consolidated and reinforced across the modules, potentially leading to deeper and more nuanced learning than ticking the modules off one by one. In their third suggestion, the authors take a more holistic perspective, advocating for more reasonable temporal logistics that make time for feedback conversations in the spirit of dialogue rather than “transactional labour”. They see the need for more trust in staff to use feedback time effectively through flexible timelines that allow for teachers to respond to students’ specific needs and circumstances. Changes like these can help shock university assessment practices out of arrythmia and back to supporting student learning in line with more natural rhythms than those that are currently being experienced.

Comment: This article emphasizes that conditions for formative assessment can be challenging to establish within university systems that focus on productivity, sometimes at the expense of quality. While summative assessments can be dealt with relatively efficiently, formative evaluation demands time for processing, dialogue, uncertainty, and cognitive struggle. That time can get lost in the rapid pace of education, where students and teachers move from preparing for one assessment to the next, and then quickly from one module or course to the next. No wonder we experience arrythmia! Pulses are racing!

When I consider my own relationship with assessments from a teacher perspective, it sometimes feels like I finish grading one task and immediately move on to grading the next. Sound familiar? I might use my 10-15 minutes per student, but I know some students would benefit from twice that amount. If I take twice the time for one, someone else may miss out. It is a challenge to use the allocated time fairly across students with varying needs and situations. This can be a tough job for the teacher who understands the value of formative assessment but is structurally denied the time for it.

Then there is the student perspective. I want them to be able to digest my input and have opportunities to put it to use in subsequent tasks, to show they’ve understood and can apply it. But I fear that seldom happens. Maybe they read my comments, maybe not. In any case, they are on to their next module. The arrythmia continues. Too little time is allocated for their individual needs, feedback uptake, and application work. If we are meant to be teaching rather than continuously testing, that takes time. I find myself wondering if students realize what they miss out on in these compressed timeframes. Would they appreciate the time to consider and digest feedback in formative ways? Or do they simply want to pass so they can move on to the next module? I hope it isn’t the latter, but I suspect it is for many. They may have succumbed to institutional time. The quickened pulse has little chance to recover. Everyone else is moving on, so I’d better as well. Leave this learning for another time.

I also wonder about the role of AI in both formative and summative assessment. Can technological tools like AI or Inspera allow us to offload the summative tasks so we can reallocate time for the formative guidance that we teachers are trained to give?

Try to bake short formative opportunities into lectures and seminars. Add optional assignments for formative feedback for those who really show a desire to engage with teachers in those ways. The optional would likely take AI out of it and the ones who don’t feel they need it would simply let the opportunity pass, in theory at least. Of course, some who should do it may not, but this seems a reasonable compromise to give an opportunity whose sole purpose is formative. Not obligatory.

Text: Joseph Siegel, Department of English

The Article
Winstone, N. E., & Gravett, K. (2026). Assessment Arrythmia: restoring rhythms of time, space, and practice in higher education. Higher Education, 1-18.

Keywords: formative assessment, summative assessment, academic pace, evaluation procedures