Continuous assessment is nothing new, especially in further and vocational education. For example, within culinary education continuous assessment is seen as essential in developing 'mastery' of a skill or technique and is central to the concept of experiential learning and developing the right mindset to persevere and see their professional abilities as a progression and not fixed. This is very much in line with the work of Dweck (2012) who differentiated between those with a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. To a certain degree we could also use the same dichotomy between summative (you either know it or you don't on a fixed day) and formative (you might not know it now, but you will) assessment.

The emergence of technologies has enabled the use of continuous assessment in areas beyond that of the apprenticeship (Cope and Kalentzis, 2017), making it possible in a practical sense that was incredibly difficult and very time consuming previously. It is now possible for development to be incremental with discursive feedback, not just from thet teachers but also from peers and external sources of expertise. However, as with many examples of using technology to create new affordances for teaching and learning, it is the design and implementation of continuous assessment that success or disappoint lies. Continous assessment can sometimes be viewed not as an 'extension' of formative but as a hybrid of formative and summative. It also involves a higher level of accountability and responsibility on the side of the students to 'do something' with the feedback - I believe this is partly due to students' previous experience of feedback as 'the end' of a process (ie a summative assessment you cannot retake) rather than an essential part of the journey. For this reason 'feed forward' is seen as playing an important role in continous assessment (Hernandez, 2012) in supporting students in how to apply feedback into their learning and affordances.

Cope, B., and Kalantzis, M. (2017). Conceptualizing e-learning,  in B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (Eds), e-Learning ecologies, New York, Routledge.

Dweck, C. (2012) Mindset: How you can fulfil your potential, London, Robinson

Hernandez, R. (2012) Does continuous assessment in higher education support student learning? Higher Education, 64, pp 489-502. Available: http://eprints.teachingandlearning.ie/2489/1/Hernandez%202012.pdf