Assessing Student Learning in Higher Education

George A Brown, Joanna Bull, Malcolm Pendlebury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136183485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

There is no doubt about the importance of assessment: it defines what students regard as important, how they spend their time and how they come to see themselves - it is a necessary part of helping them to learn.
This text provides background research on different aspects of assessment. Its purpose is to help lecturers to refresh their approach to the assessment of student learning.
It explores the nature of conventional assessment such as essays and projects, and also considers less widely used approaches such as self- and peer-assessment. There are also chapters devoted to the use of IT, the role of external examiners and the introduction of different forms of assessment.
With guidelines, suggestions, examples of practice and activities, this book will become a springboard for action, discussion and even more active learning.

Chapter 1

Introduction to the text

WHAT THIS TEXT IS ABOUT

This text provides background research on different aspects of assessment and learning in higher education together with guidelines, suggestions, examples of practice and activities that are designed to encourage reflection upon the nature and processes of assessment and learning. Its purpose is to help colleagues to refresh and develop their approach to the assessment of student learning. The task of assessing student learning involves knowledge, understanding and skills of assessment and of student learning. Hence we begin the text (Chapter 2) by considering what assessment is, what its purposes are and the emerging trends in assessment in higher education. We then (in Chapter 3) consider briefly the nature of student learning and its assessment. Subsequent chapters (4–12) are concerned with ways of assessing student learning through conventional approaches such as essays, multiple choice questions and problems and less widely used approaches that are often based on self- and peer-assessment. Chapter 13 is devoted to the various uses of IT in assessing, recording and reporting assessments. Chapter 14 is concerned with introducing different forms of assessment into a course and Chapter 15 with some of the assumptions underlying approaches to reliability and validity. The final chapter addresses issues of quality and standards. It is followed by an appendix containing sample examination questions; notes and comments on the activities provided for each chapter; suggestions for further reading and a bibliography.

Throughout the book, there are three main themes: effectiveness, efficiency and enablement. Efficiency is a primary concern for lecturers who are overloaded with teaching, assessment and related administration and who at the same time may be being urged to create stronger links with industry and to generate research. Effectiveness is concerned with ensuring that student learning matches course objectives — a knotty issue because one needs to know how students learn, how to express objectives in forms that guide the learners and course designers and how to create teaching and learning situations that move the students towards the learning outcomes, the objectives of the course. Effectiveness ties in with the notion of fitness for purpose and so has implications for the Higher Education Funding Councils' assessment of the quality of educational provision in subject departments. The deepest and probably most challenging theme is enablement how one uses assessment as well as teaching and learning to develop understanding and expertise and lay the foundations of life-long learning. Its primary objective is to enable students to cope with changes in knowledge, systems of working and new materials and methods. Graduates are likely to change their jobs at least five times during their careers; even if they do not change jobs, their jobs will change. So in a sense one has to prepare them for the unknown or, at best, the dimly known. The best way of doing that is to provide experiences and assessments for students which enable them to become autonomous, self-motivated learners who have a large repertoire of problem-solving strategies for working with materials, concepts and people. Enablement, then, is concerned with the longer reach, with what graduates might be doing in 20 years' time. It goes beyond the issue of fitness for purpose to that of fitness of purpose for the 21st century. Assessment of students' understanding of these themes is important in its own right and it also may provide students with strategies for thinking about other deep issues that they may encounter in their working lives.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

How you use this text is, of course, dependent upon your purpose in reading it. As a broad strategy, we suggest that you browse through the contents list and skim the chapters before choosing your pathway through them.

The book may then be used in at least five different ways. First, it may simply be read. This approach will certainly refresh your knowledge of assessment. Second, you may read it, tackle some of the activities and check the notes and comments. This approach will deepen your reading and help you reflect upon your approaches to assessment. The notes and comments on the activities are provided so that readers can match their thoughts and observations against those of others who have tried the activities and against the views of the authors. Readers may find the notes and comments helpful and, perhaps, interesting. We expect that some people will disagree with the comments some of the time and a few may disagree with the comments all of the time. Third, the book may be used as a guide for a series of meetings between a less experienced teacher and a senior colleague who is acting as a mentor during the probationary period. Fourth, you may use the book as a source for a series of lunchtime meetings with colleagues in your department or other departments. Used in this way the text will, we hope, become a springboard for action, discussion and even more active learning. Fifth, the book may be used as the recommended text for a short course on assessment. If it is used in this way it is hoped that the course will be based upon the principles of reflective learning rather than those of effective lecturing.

REFLECTIVE LEARNING

Readers of this book will be aware of the importance of reflecting upon what one reads and relating one's reading to ones practice. The activities in the chapters are designed to prompt those reflections. It is not proposed to rehearse in this chapter all the arguments from Dewey (1933), Kolb (1984), Boud et al. (1985), Schon (1983, 1988), and Hatton and Smith (1995) on the importance of reflective learning. That theme is discussed in Chapter 3. It is sufficient here to say that reflective learning is essential to the research work of any self-respecting academic. All we ask is that the same degree of understanding, expertise and responsibility is applied to the problems of assessing students. After all, we may be marking students for life.

Whilst reading this text you may wish to use an assessment logbook or file to record your thoughts on assessment and your responses to the chapters and activities that you tackle. This approach is widely used by Open University students and is one that other undergraduates are being asked to use in portfolios, learning diaries and records of achievement (Bull and Otter, 1994). The inside experience that you gain by keeping a log may help you to guide students in their log-keeping.

You may want to keep your assessment log in the form of a commonplace notebook or you may prefer a more formal structure, such as:

• your initial thoughts on aspects of assessment

• your existing methods of assessment and feedback

• your responses to the activities in this book

• your subsequent thoughts on aspects of assessment

• any plans for reviewing approaches to assessment in your courses

• any plans and strategies for modifying assessment in your courses

• any useful references or quotes

• any random thoughts on assessment and its deeper implications.

A structured assessment notebook will help you to reflect systematically, to plan, to act and to reflect again.

GETTING GROUPS TO WORK ON ASSESSMENT

Given the challenging nature of assessment it seems sensible to work with a group of colleagues or, if that is not possible, then with a colleague. Colleagues of ours who have been involved in the Enterprise in Higher Education programme (ED 1991; Gray, 1995) and the Effective Engineering Education Project (Brown et al., 1994) as departmental or school coordinators valued highly the mutual support and shared thinking on assessment which was engendered in their group meetings. A group of interested colleagues within the same department or school can build upon their common knowledge of the subjects involved and they may have a greater impact than any one individual upon course design, course delivery and the quality of student learning.

In essence, the group needs to establish its framework of purposes and procedures. These should include the frequency of meetings, a programme of activities and any allocation of tasks. For example, the group might discuss methods of organising an assessment log or it might use its first meeting to establish its priorities. The purposes of the working group should be reviewed after a few meetings.

Groups usually go through the phases of forming, storming and norming before they get to the stage of performing a task. As readers will know, some working groups do not get beyond the storming phase and some regress to that phase and disintegrate. To maximise effectiveness of task performance, one has to attend to personal details, including the physical as well as the psychological comfort of the group. In concrete terms, that means a comfortable, well equipped and well ventilated meeting room which has easy access to food and drink. It is also useful, after a few meetings, to review the workings and achievements of the group. Again this task is not only valuable in its own right, it will also help you to understand the processes of group assessment that you may want your students to attempt.

WORKING WITH A MENTOR

‘Mentor’ is a fashionable term for a senior colleague whose task is to help a newly qualified or less experienced colleague to develop his/her expertise. A similar notion was advocated in universities in the 1970s but infrequently put into practice. The essentials of a good mentor-colleague relationship are mutual rapport, a structure of regular meetings and a series of jointly agreed tasks. An assessment log provides a useful framework for developing expertise in assessment and for reviewing progress. Such an approach is used successfully in dentistry, medicine and nursing (Morton-Cooper and Palmer, 1993) as well as in higher education.

Giving feedback

Giving feedback is a central skill of assessment so it may be wise to get it right in a mentor-colleague relationship or in a group that meets to discuss assessment.

The purpose of fee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction to the text
• 2 What is assessment?
• 3 Student learning
• 4 Methods and strategies: an overview
• 5 Assessing essays
• 6 Multiple choice questions
• 7 Assessing practical work
• 8 Assessing projects
• 9 Assessing problem-solving
• 10 Assessing oral communication
• 11 Peer- and self-assessment
• 12 Self-assessment: some related approaches
• 13 Using Computers in assessment
• 14 Changing assessment procedures
• 15 Reliability, validity and examining
• 16 Quality, Standards and underlying issues
• Appendix Examples of examination questions in arts, law and social sciences
• Notes and comments on activities
• Some further reading
• Bibliography
• Index