Assessing Skills and Practice

Sally Brown, Ruth Pickford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134161317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Assessing Skills and Practice outlines how to ensure fair, consistent and reliable assessment of practical activities. With a particular focus on formative feedback and its role in helping students to understand what is required of them, this guide is packed with advice, examples and case studies covering the key areas, including:

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• assessing across the arts, humanities and sciences – from labwork and clinical practice to dance
• assessing oral work
• using feedback
• ensuring inclusive and fair assessment.

This volume is an ideal introduction for new or part-time lecturers and will also be valued by experienced teachers who are new to this area of assessment or who want to improve their current practice.

Chapter 1
The importance of good practical assessment design

Assessment methods and requirements probably have a greater influence on how and what students learn than any other single factor. This influence may well be of greater importance than the impact of teaching materials.

(Boud 1988)

As Boud argues: if you get the assessment right, you are likely to direct students’ activities appropriately. Students gain cues about what you value from the assignments/tasks you set and will direct their out-of-class learning activities accordingly. If we focus the tasks we set them on recall and memorisation, that’s what they’ll do! If, however, we want to encourage them to take a deep rather than a surface approach to the development of practical skills, we need to design practical assignments intelligently. We need to think not just about the assessment criteria but also about weighting, timing, agency and ‘fitness for purpose’, with imaginative consideration of methods and approaches that can challenge students, be inclusive and suit the topic, context, cohort and level. Practical assessments should link clearly to the most sensible evidence of practical skill our students could produce to demonstrate their achievement of the intended outcome. Essential to all forms of assessment is clarity about criteria, and this is particularly the case when the assessor is considering the extent to which practical skills have been satisfactorily demonstrated.

DESIGNING FIT-FOR-PURPOSE PRACTICAL ASSESSMENTS

Authentic practical assessment which genuinely assesses what it sets out to assess needs to use ‘fit-for-purpose’ assessment approaches. When designing any practical assessment instrument, process or strategy we should be seeking answers to a series of questions that can help to make the design of assignments systematic, coherent and aligned with our intentions (Box 1.1).

Box 1.1

FIT-FOR-PURPOSE PRACTICAL ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS

Why are we assessing?

What are our particular purposes for understanding the task on this occasion?

To give feedback?

To help students to adjust their practice?

To make a pass/fail decision?

To motivate or reinforce practice?

To grade or categorise students?

To testify regarding fitness-to-practice?

To enable informed option or career choice?

To help students know how they are doing?

To help them know where they need to direct their energies?

To remediate errors and modify inappropriate behaviours?

To review under-pinning values?

To help us know what impact our teaching is having?

What is it we are assessing?

Is the focus on product, outcome or process, or the use of theory in practice?

How important is the means by which the practical outcome is achieved?

Does it make sense to assess work in progress as well as the finished product?

Is group work or teamwork an important component of the achievement?

How important is originality/creativity?

To what extent is conformance with standards important?

How are we assessing?

What methods and approaches can we use?

Should we be using vivas, presentations, portfolios, in-tray exercises, case-studies, posters, production of artefacts, performances, annotated bibliographies, surveys, projects, laboratory activities, live or simulated interaction with clients/patients?

Is group, self or peer assessment appropriate?

How useful would computer-assisted assessment be?

Is online assessment a possibility?

Who is best placed...

Table of contents

• Key Guides for Effective Teaching in Higher Education Series
• Contents
• Figures
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The importance of good practical assessment design
• Chapter 2 Assessing practical skills
• Chapter 3 Ensuring equivalence of experience for disabled students
• Chapter 4 Assessing diverse students fairly
• Chapter 5 Fostering independent learning
• Chapter 6 Assessing presentations and other oral work
• Chapter 7 Assessing practical skills in laboratories
• Chapter 8 Assessing the production of artefacts in the studio and workshop
• Chapter 9 Assessing live performance
• Chapter 10 Assessing process
• Chapter 11 Using other stakeholders to assess student achievement
• Chapter 12 Assessing skills and practice
• Bibliography and further reading
• Index