Technology-enhanced formative assessments (TEFAs) are widely promoted as mechanisms for improving student engagement, feedback use, and learning in higher education. However, educators often lack practice-facing guidance to support informed design decisions beyond tool selection or generic pedagogical recommendations. Theoretical frameworks can play an important role in helping educators conceptualise and plan pedagogical interventions, including those involving digital technologies. This paper presents the development of a practice-facing theoretical framework, integrating Learning-Oriented Assessment (LOA) (Carless, 2007; Carless et al., 2011) and the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (Mishra and Koehler, 2006), to support educator decision-making in the design and implementation of TEFAs.

The framework emerged through a participatory action research study conducted across three iterative cycles within the author’s own teaching practice. Drawing on established action research traditions (Elliott, 1991; Coughlan and Coghlan, 2002), the study examined how theoretical assumptions about formative assessment, feedback, learner agency, and technology were enacted and contested in practice under real institutional conditions. Quantitative engagement data and qualitative student feedback informed cycle-by-cycle refinements to both pedagogical design and the evolving framework. The research formed part of the author’s doctoral study, which explored the role of technology-enhanced formative assessment in supporting student engagement and learning in higher education. Across the cycles, the research revealed persistent tensions between formative intentions and summative assessment structures, uneven patterns of student engagement, and the need for educators to balance pedagogical aims with institutional and technological constraints.

Rather than functioning as a technical or prescriptive model, the resulting LOA–TPACK framework is presented as a decision-making lens that highlights pedagogical intent, learner experience, and feedback processes, while treating technology as an enabling but secondary condition. The framework is explicitly informed by a state of the actual (Selwyn, 2008) account of practice, acknowledging persistent summative assessment dominance, uneven learner engagement, strategic student behaviour, and practical constraints on time and workload.

The paper argues that the value of the framework lies not in claims of optimisation or transformation, but in its capacity to support reflective professional judgement in complex educational contexts. While the framework contributes to the theoretical understandings of technology-enhanced formative assessment, it also offers a practical structure that educators can use to plan and reflect on pedagogical interventions involving digital technologies. By making visible the tensions between formative ideals and institutional realities, the framework contributes a grounded, human-centred approach to TEFA design that aligns with contemporary calls to shift EdTech research from questions of how technologies are implemented to who they meaningfully serve.