Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education

Learning for the Longer Term

David Boud, Nancy Falchikov, David Boud, Nancy Falchikov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134152148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Assessment is a value-laden activity surrounded by debates about academic standards, preparing students for employment, measuring quality and providing incentives. There is substantial evidence that assessment, rather than teaching, has the major influence on students' learning. It directs attention to what is important and acts as an incentive for study.

This book revisits assessment in higher education, examining it from the point of view of what assessment does and can do and argues that assessment should be seen as an act of informing judgement and proposes a way of integrating teaching, learning and assessment to better prepare students for a lifetime of learning. It is essential reading for practitioners and policy makers in higher education institutions in different countries, as well as for educational development and institutional research practitioners.

Part 1
Setting the scene

Chapter 1
Introduction

Assessment for the longer term

David Boud and Nancy Falchikov

Assessment affects people’s lives. The future directions and careers of students depend on it. There are risks involved in changing assessment without considering the consequences. This has meant that there has been very slow movement in the development of new assessment ideas and changes in practice. We face a system of assessment that has been subject to slow incremental change, to compromise and to inertia. We are afraid to change the system because of the risks, but we also avoid looking at it because doing so might entail major effort.

Assessment frames students’ views of higher education. It is also a major concern and burden for those teaching them. However, it is such a commonplace matter that we often make assumptions about assessment on the basis of what we have experienced in the past rather than in terms of the new circumstances that confront us. Assessment has also influenced our own paths as learners and has contributed to our gaining the positions we now hold. This means that we have a considerable personal investment in what has appeared to work in the past.

What is at stake here is the nature of higher education itself. Assessment, rather than teaching, has a major influence on students’ learning. It directs attention to what is important. It acts as an incentive for study. And it has a powerful effect on what students do and how they do it. Assessment also communicates to them what they can and cannot succeed in doing. For some, it builds their confidence for their future work; for others, it shows how inadequate they are as learners and undermines their confidence about what they can do in the future.

Assessment would be less of a problem if we could be assured that what occurs under the guise of assessment appropriately influenced student learning. However, when we look at the content and approaches used in the dominant assessment practices in higher education, we find that they are often focused on students demonstrating current knowledge, generating material for grading and getting (often inadequate) feedback from teachers. Commonly, assessment focuses little on the processes of learning and on how students will learn after the point of assessment. In other words, assessment is not sufficiently equipping students to learn in situations in which teachers and examinations are not present to focus their attention. As a result, we are failing to prepare them for the rest of their lives.

The beginnings of change

Discussions of assessment are commonly dominated by the needs of certification: what is the best or most efficient method of assessment? How should grades be recorded? How should they be assembled? What constitutes a first-class honours degree? This focus tends to eclipse considerations of the impact of assessment on learning. Time and energy are devoted to assessment activities that are completed too late for them to have an impact on students’ learning. In addition, the certification debate has prompted student anxiety and demands that all work be counted for marks and grades. Thus, summative assessment has secured its foothold.

The past ten years has seen a counter-movement to the emphasis on what Peter Knight (2006) has termed ‘high-stakes assessment’. Assessment for learning has begun to take a place on the agenda within institutions, although it still takes a secondary place in public policy debates and in the media. One marker of the change of emphasis was the 1998 publication of a substantial literature review by Black and Wiliam. This examined research on formative assessment – that is, how assessment influences learning – and pointed to a number of fruitful directions for development. While this work has had the greatest impact on assessment in schools in the UK, it has also been taken up and used to justify a renewed emphasis on assessment for learning in higher education. Since then there has been a flourishing of papers about assessment for learning in higher education. These have focused on such matters as the role of feedback for learning, the consequential effects of assessment practices on student behaviour, the types of learning that various assessment regimes prompt, the need to align assessment with desired student outcomes and so on. There is now a substantial body of knowledge on which to draw, much of which is addressed in this book.

We are now in a position to step back and challenge the controlling effect of assessment that focuses students on the performance of assessment itself, rather than on what studying in higher education is arguably for: that is, providing a foundation for a lifetime of learning and work in which there is little formal assessment or formal instruction.

The aim of this book

We have been troubled for some time about these problems of assessment. In discussion we came to the conclusion that it was timely to review the state of the assessment debate and consider how assessment can provide an adequate basis for the future. In particular we were concerned that assessment was having a deleterious effect on learning and was not providing a sound basis for learning beyond graduation. What alternatives were there to the common practices we encountered every day? We were aware that there had been many innovations in assessment, some of which have, often partially or indirectly, attempted to address this problem. These have gone under a variety of headings, such as portfolio assessment, self- and peer assessment, authentic assessment and so on.

We identified that, to date, there had been little effort to bring these together around the major purpose of equipping students to learn for the long term. There was, we believed, a need to conceptualise this clearly as an important goal for assessment and to explore the variety of practices that might be utilised to this end. Our view was that students need to develop their own repertoire of assessment-related practices that they will be able to use when confronted with learning challenges throughout their working lives. We realised that, at present, assessment in higher education did not place this as a significant outcome compared to certifying existing knowledge and giving students feedback on current learning.

This led us to begin to formulate a proposal for a book that would look beyond the immediate practices of assessment to consider what assessment would look like if we took seriously the need for it to provide students with a firm foundation for their learning after they had completed their programmes of study. There are now signs that an increasing number of people are willing to confront the challenge of assessment and think differently about it. Momentum has been slowly building towards a more substantial rethinking of assessment than we have seen before. There are many examples of this rethinking in the research literature, but so far they do not seem to have had much impact on overall practice. Indeed, there are few signs that those who most influence assessment policy and practice are even aware that such rethinking is taking place.

We saw a need to bring together some of the most interesting of the reappraisals of assessment and to focus these on the central aim of higher education of preparing students for a lifetime of learning in work and in the community. The key question asked in the book is: how can assessment influence learners in what they do after graduation? It looks to the longer term and explores what can be done in university courses to prepare students for a lifetime of learning and professional work.

Earlier origins

It is easy to portray this book solely as responding to our perceptions of the condition of higher education now. However, all books are located in the experiences and concerns of their authors and are influenced by their biographies. This book emerged from the encounters the editors and contributors have had with assessment during their lives. We have been touched by assessment and it has to a greater or lesser extent affected what we have done and what opportunities we have taken up. While the book aims to be a scholarly contribution to an important current issue, it is also shaped by the experiences of those who write. While the theme of the impact of assessment is taken up later in one of our own chapters, we wish to note here the origins of the book in the experiences of the two editors. This started from our being assessed as students, through our assessing of students as academic staff members and now to investigating assessment as researchers. We digress from the style of the rest of this introduction to portray this experience in the first person.

David Boud writes:

I have strong memories from school and university of feeling frustrated and dismayed by the capricious nature of assessment. In school, I experienced getting the highest marks in some subjects and the lowest in others, of being told that I couldn’t write well and failing English, and succeeding almost simultaneously at the highest level in physics in ways that seemed mysterious at the time. I started to realise then that there was a code of assessment to be learned and if I could crack this code, I could do well even when not confident of knowing much about the subject being assessed. At one stage this led me to pass an Open University module (in which, incidentally, the assessment activities were better designed than in many other university courses) with only a perfunctory knowledge of the subject matter. Learning about assessment, I discovered, was as important for success in education as learning what the subject was ostensibly about.

As a research student I was drawn into discussions of assessment and was introduced by John Heron for the first time to the idea of taking responsibility for one’s own assessment and working with others on what was termed ‘self- and peer assessment’. This was a revelation to me: I realised that I wasn’t dependent on teachers and assessors for judgements: it was something I could do for myself. It was only later that I recognised that in spending time working out the assessment codes in formal courses I was involved in a similar process. But that, of course, was about following someone else’s agenda, not my own.

So persuaded was I by the value of collaborative courses and self-assessment that I utilised it in the first courses for which I was fully responsible for teaching. Students were surprised and disconcerted to be given significant responsibility for assessment decisions, but I never had any difficulty in persuading them of the value of what they were doing and the importance of it for their professional lives. On moving from what was primarily a teaching position to one that involved research and development in higher education, I started to work with academics across a range of discipline areas to help them introduce forms of self- and peer assessment in their own courses. This resulted in a number of research papers and helped cement self-assessment as a legitimate area of inquiry in assessment.

A fortuitous meeting and discovery of a common interest led me to collaborate with Nancy Falchikov for the first time during her period of sabbatical leave in Sydney. We decided that there had been enough individual studies on selfassessment in higher education by that time (the late 1980s) to undertake a serious review of the literature. This led to one review article (Boud and Falchikov, 1989) and one meta-analysis of the different studies we had been able to identify (Falchikov and Boud, 1989). Unfortunately, the literature then was still dominated by studies comparing teacher with student marks, but it nevertheless provided an impetus for further work that went beyond this. On Nancy’s return to Scotland, our interests continued in parallel, as she focused on peer assessment (e.g., Falchikov and Goldfinch, 2000) and I on self-assessment (Boud, 1995).

After my 1995 book that consolidated work on self-assessment up to that point, my interests moved in other directions, and it was only when I was invited to give a series of workshops and presentations in 1999 that I re-engaged with the literature and started to think again about the issues involved in assessment in higher education. Until then I had taken a substantially learner-centred view of assessment and regarded all assessment as ultimately subordinate to learner self-assessment. This was on the grounds that only the learner can learn and therefore any act of assessment that takes place on the student will only influence their learning behaviour if it corresponds to the learner’s own self-assessment. There may, of course, also be a short-term compliance effect as well, but I thought that this was unlikely to lead to a permanent change in what learners do.

In order to influence institutional assessment policy I saw that it was necessary to frame assessment not in terms of the individual student’s perspective, but in terms of the intentions of the institution. Such a reframing would acknowledge the learner’s perspective but direct attention to the concerns of the institution and what it could do. Hopefully, it would address the problem of the fragmented and isolated take up of self-assessment ideas by individual staff members, which had beneficial but limited impact on students, and allow for more systematic development over time. The reframing took the form of developing the idea of sustainable assessment. That is, assessment practices that met the needs of an institution to certify or provide feedback on students’ work, but which would also meet the longer-term need of equipping students for a lifetime of learning (Boud, 2000). In this way of viewing assessment, every act of assessment would do double duty in addressing the immediate needs of the institution while also contributing in some way to the development of the skills and capabilities of students to be effective learners.

Nancy Falchikov writes:

In common with many people, I have a strong memory of dissatisfaction regarding the assessment of some coursework while at university. In the first year of my degree, I was one of a large laboratory class that appeared to be run by a small army of Ph.D. students. Being a mature student, I worked diligently and turned in work with which I was satisfied, and which generally received good marks. However, in the lab class, there appeared to be no relationship between the marks I, or any of my fellow-students, received and the quality of the work submitted. The criteria I had identified and applied to other work seemed not to apply in this case, and I couldn’t understand why. I guess I had developed a strong capacity for self-assessment and felt resentment at the injustice I perceived to be taking place. I remember discussing the matter with peers, raising this issue and getting nowhere.

Later in my studies at university, another graduate student tutor advised me that I didn’t need to work as hard as was my custom, and I was encouraged to take short cuts. I was being nudged towards what I later learned was a strategic approach to studying when I was striving for a deep one. I resisted this pressure, as I was enjoying my way of doing things too much.

Later, while working in what is now a new university, I had the good fortune to hear John Cowan talking about self-assessment, about how his students had been helped to assess their own work. How obvious! How simple! How useful! Of course, students should be encouraged to do this. So, I set about designing a scheme of my own. Looking back, it was very bold, involving both self- and peer assessment by first-year students, and I was lucky that it worked so well. I extended and refined my use of self- and peer assessment across my teaching, disseminated my results within my own institution and published some of my studies.

Some of my published work came to the attention of Dave Boud, with whom I subsequently corresponded on the topic of self-assessment. On one of his frequent visits to the UK, I met him and we planned for me to spend some time working in his unit at the University of New South Wales. Our collaboration led to publication of two papers on the topic of self-assessment – a critical analysis (Boud and Falchikov, 1989) and a meta-analysis (Falchikov and Boud, 1989). During my time in Australia, I also continued to develop my ideas about peer assessment. I had, and have, the belief that, as social beings, we need to relate to other people in all contexts, including assessment. I remembered the solidarity I’d experienced as a first-year undergraduate as we tried to challenge the lab assignment marking. Even though we changed nothing within the formal system, our case was strengthened by our ability to compare our work, to discuss possible reasons for grades awarded. Our resolve was strengthened by our group membership.

After my sojourn in Australia, I returned to teaching in Scotland, where I continued to involve my students in assessment, turning my attention to the role of peers and group dynamics. My background as a psychologist stood me in good stead, providing a theoretical framework within which to locate my work. I felt that a meta-analytic study of peer assessment, a companion to the one I had carried out on self-assessment during my time in Australia with Dave, would be a useful resource for the assessment research community. I thus set about locating and collecting all available relevant peer assessment studies. This venture took some time, but, along with my friend and colleague Judy Goldfinch, a meta-analysis of peer assessment studies was published in 2000. While I appreciated the value of this study, I was also aware that peer assessment involves a great deal more than awarding grades. During my search for studies which had compared teacher and student grades for the meta-analysis, I had found many examples of what I termed ‘qualitative’ studies which had focused on what people nowadays seem to call ‘soft outcomes’, the sort of manifestation that helps personal and professional development and is as much focused on the future as on the past or present. I continued to collect these types of study, too.

Concerns within my institution about student attrition and ways of supporting students to reduce this took me into new, though still very student-centred, territory. This ended with my designing and taking part in a study to evaluate the effectiveness of an institution-wide initiative to support students in their first year at university. I also became involved in carrying out and evaluating some peer tutoring initiatives. It is possible to see peer tutoring, involving students in teaching, as a natural development from involving students in assessment, both initiatives being designed to help students develop autonomy within the learning environment. My work on learning together through peer tutoring culminated in publication of a book on the subject in 2001.

I now turned my attention back to peer assessment, returned to the collection of papers on the topic I had accumulated during the research for the meta-analysis, and added to it very substantially. Peer assessment seemed to have taken off as a subject. In 2005, I published my book on the subject of involving students in assessment.

I met up with Dave on many occasions after our first research and publishing venture. (I’ve become nearly as regular a visitor to Australia as Dave is to the UK.) Our paths, having diverged for a time, seem to have come together again with our shared interest in peer learning, as well as in involving students in assessment. During a period of his working in the UK, Dave and I began discussions about h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Part 1: Setting the scene
• Part 2: The context of assessment
• Part 3: Themes
• Part 4: The practice of assessment