CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 InternationalDonaghue, HelenHeron, Marion2024-12-092024-12-092024-12-09Donaghue, H. and Heron, M. (2024) ‘Using genre analysis to design formative assessment in higher education’, Innovations in Education and Teaching International. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2024.2437115.https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/14068https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2024.2437115Helen Donaghue - ORCID: 0000-0002-7227-7864 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7227-7864Formative assessment (FA) is universally recognised as key to supporting student learning and success in higher education (HE). Despite this, summative assessment dominates HE students’ studies. We join an increasing call for more focus on formative assessment and propose an original professional development (PD) approach to help HE teachers design formative assessment tasks, using the concept of genre knowledge. Data from pre-workshop questionnaires, in-workshop activities and post workshop interviews demonstrate genre knowledge to be an effective heuristic to identify task requirements. This genre knowledge helps teachers design FA tasks which scaffold final summative assessments through focused development of specific areas of genre knowledge. We make recommendations on how teachers and trainers can use genre knowledge to raise awareness of and provide support for designing FA tasks which enhance student learning and success.en© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Genre KnowledgeGenre AnalysisFormative AssessmentSummative AssessmentHigher EducationArticle