Assessment for Learning in Higher Education

Kay Sambell, Liz McDowell, Catherine Montgomery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136734939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"an invaluable guide for practitioners, quality assurors, university managers and students themselves who wish to better understand the importance of assessment for learning, and it will further scholarship in the field significantly."

-Professor Sally Brown

Assessment for Learning in Higher Education is a practical guide to Assessment for Learning (AfL); a term that has become internationally accepted in Higher Education and features in the learning and teaching strategies of many universities. It is also mandated by official bodies such as QAA in the UK. Many staff in Higher Education are uncertain about how to implement AfL, especially in times of increasingly constrained resources and this vital new guide provides solutions that make best use of assessment as a tool for learning.

This book provides an important and accessible blend of practical examples of AfL in a variety of subject areas. The authors present practical, often small-scale and eminently 'do-able' ideas that will make its introduction achievable. It provides practical case examples both for new lecturers and more experienced staff who may be interested in embedding AfL principles and practice into their university teaching. AfL approaches go beyond minor adaptations to teaching practice, and signify a shift in the foundations of thinking about assessment. With this in mind there is guidance on the development of effective learning environments and communities through the use of:

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• collaboration and dialogue

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• authentic assessment

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• formative assessment

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• peer and self assessment

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• student development for the long term

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• innovative approaches to effective feedback.

It provides helpful, realistic guidance backed up by relevant theory and is written in an accessible, jargon-free style, grounded in practical experience and brought to life via a wide range of illustrative examples and case studies.

Assessment for Learning in Higher Education fills a vital gap in assessment literature and as AfL is increasingly on the Higher Education agenda, with the promotion of assessment as a tool for learning, this book will become an essential handbook to guide all academic practitioners.

Chapter 1

Designing authentic assessment

The principle of authenticity is vitally important when it comes to designing effective Assessment for Learning environments. In this chapter we will explain why authenticity is so important for us to consider, so that assessment means more to students than just jumping through hoops.

This chapter covers:

• designing assessment tasks to promote deep, complex and worthwhile learning;

• creating tasks which students experience as meaningful and relevant in their own right;

• assessment which helps students develop a sense of ‘really doing’ the subject;

• assessment which students feel relates in some way to the real world;

• tasks which offer students a sense of personal involvement;

• challenges and issues in creating authentic assessment;

• strategies to promote learning communities via authentic assessment.

Voicing the issues

Karl is a second-year student who enjoys his electronic engineering course. He seems to relish the challenges that the degree offers and responds to most tasks with enthusiasm. His eagerness, though, wanes when he talks about the ways he studies a module when he knows his work will be assessed purely by an end-point exam.

Karl feels that exams are, as he puts it, unfair, because he thinks they don't give him a chance to show what he knows and how far he can apply ideas. Instead he feels that he must simply try to remember a set of facts and figures which he must recall when his lecturers demand. He explains:

“Exams are not a normal way of working. Actually, when you think about it, they're rather pointless – they just say whether you're having a hard time remembering or an easy time remembering. So you revise in a way that means you just think ‘Let me remember this for a short while’. You try and cram for an exam. When I know I have got an exam on a module I revise by writing down all the information I have to learn on post-it notes, which I stick up round the flat. The house gets covered with them! It's shallow learning which doesn't stick. Actually, you try to forget it before you take the next exam, because you don't want to get the two papers muddled up.

But it's odd, because normally, if you were in a working environment, say, and someone came to you with a problem to solve, you wouldn't necessarily have to know the stuff, and remember it, there and then. You'd say: ‘Hang on a minute, I see there's an issue, so I'll go away and find out more about it, get to the bottom of what's going on here, and come back to you with a solution once I've talked to people and done some research’. That's the way of working you might use in a project-type assignment, where your lecturers ask you to work on something in a more realistic or relevant way. But not in an exam.”

The example above illustrates one way in which, unfortunately, assessment can be detrimental to learning. The way that Karl talks about how he approaches learning when he knows he faces an end-point exam demonstrates the harmful influence that summative assessment can exert on learning. Whatever his lecturers may think, Karl's preconceptions and ideas about what an exam really tests, however ill-judged they may be, cause him to approach his studies in superficial or damaging ways. His comments about deliberately setting out to achieve ‘shallow learning’ exemplify this. So whilst his lecturers may argue that the exams they set are not simple memory tests, the fact remains that Karl's beliefs about exams exert a powerful influence over the sort of learning he sets out to achieve on specific modules. There are hints though, that when he faces a different assessment tasks such as a project his perceptions may be quite different.

One of the important issues that Karl raises is that, from his point of view, exams simply do not represent the sorts of tasks and activities he feels he would ever be asked to do in the workplace. Instead, they seem to be artificial, hoop-jumping exercises which he undertakes purely to accrue credit – in the form of marks. In this instance Karl feels assessment is somehow contrived, or false, rather than offering a relevant and meaningful insight into the sorts of skills, qualities and dispositions which will serve him well in the longer term. This all suggests that if we wish to promote lasting, worthwhile learning, we may need to think carefully about designing assessment. As we can see from Karl's comments, whether we like it or not, the assignments we set powerfully frame what students do, how they spend their time and, to a large degree, how they view the whole business of learning at university (Brown and Knight, 1994).

Theories and debates

There are substantial learning benefits to be gained by rethinking and redesigning summative assessment tasks and processes with a view to promoting and fostering deep, sustainable learning. Many researchers suggest it is vital that we carefully rethink summative assessment to ensure, as far as possible, it promotes positive messages about the type of learning we require. For example, Nicol (2009a: 5) advises that assessment tasks should ‘engage students in deep rather than surface learning’ and ‘promote students’ productive engagement in learning’. Often carefully designed ‘authentic’ assessment (Torrance, 1994) is regarded as one of the most powerful means we have to foster students’ productive, worthwhile approaches to learning. For this reason the chapter aims to suggest strategies which help promote appropriate student learning by drawing attention to the design and development of authentic assessment tasks, arguing that we can make learning happen in productive ways if students find our assessment tasks inherently meaningful and relevant.

From the 1970s, research studies began to indicate that students’ perceptions of the demands of assessment influenced their approaches to learning more heavily than teaching did. Snyder (1970), for instance, explored the ways in which the formal curriculum emphasized high-order educational goals, such as independent thinking, analysis, problem-solving ability and originality, but from the student viewpoint, assessment procedures often suggested that memorizing facts and theories were what was really needed to achieve success. Because of this, Ramsden (2003: 68) warns us that ‘unsuitable assessment methods impose irresistible pressures on students to take the wrong approach to learning tasks’. In a similar vein, Gibbs and Simpson (2004: 25) draw attention to the influence of the design of assessment tasks on ‘the quality of student engagement’, highlighting the dangers of assessment designs which embody ‘low level demands’ and result in ‘surface approaches to learning’.

We need to remain acutely sensitive to the possible ‘backwash’ effect that our assessment designs have on learning (Watkins, Dahlin and Eckholm, 2005). Higher Education claims, as a rule, to value and foster complex learning (Sadler, 2009), with an emphasis on helping students to integrate knowledge, develop sophisticated cognitive abilities and develop their lateral, imaginative, critical thinking skills. Consequently we need to consider how far our formal assessment tasks really encourage students to perceive, value and aspire to develop these qualities. Our own research (Sambell and McDowell, 1998; Sambell, McDowell and Brown, 1997) indicated that, from students’ viewpoints, ‘innovative’ or ‘alternative’ assessments seemed to endorse deep approaches to learning. The issue of authenticity was particularly important to students and is the theme which is pursued in this chapter. Authenticity implies the use of activities that are inherently meaningful, interesting, relevant, and have long-term value. In our research, if students felt that they were required to undertake assessment tasks that seemed intrinsically useful and worthwhile, for example where they sought to communicate, discuss or defend their ideas, then they were more likely to invest effort in genuine, deep and lasting learning, rather than simply going through the motions, reproducing whatever information or answers they assumed their lecturers wanted to hear or see.

The concept of authenticity is, however, a relative one (Brown, Collins and Duguid, 1989; Collins, Brown and Newman, 1989). Authenticity can be seen as faithfulness to the discipline or subject area. From this perspective, we might try to design assessment to promote students’ purposeful engagement with the subject matter and the methods of enquiry that are valued in particular academic disciplines. If, for example, we want our students to develop disciplinary identities and immerse themselves in ways of being, knowing and seeing which start to emulate the kinds of things that disciplinary experts do, we need to design assessment to be authentic in these kinds of ways. Here the sorts of questions we might ask about our assessment tasks include:

• How far do the tasks we set encourage students to genuinely understand the subject, so that they form a sense of thinking and practising (Meyer and Land, 2005) like an engineer, biologist, geographer, historian and so on, as opposed to juggling formulae or performing tasks in an isolated, formulaic or unconnected way? Ramsden (2003: 39) suggests that we may find students involved in ‘imitation’ rather than ‘real’ subjects, that is, learning processes which are only about passing tests and completing assignments with no personal relevance or bearing on the world their studies are supposed to explain.

• How far do the tasks make students feel they are really being required to act as a developing participant in the disciplinary community, as opposed to feeling they are being asked simply to be a student being made to produce an essay, or a poster, almost regardless of the disciplinary context?

Authenticity can also be seen in terms of applying learning to, or learning within, real-world contexts or practices beyond the academy. It is probably no surprise that much of the research work on authenticity to date has been conducted in professional education such as nursing (e.g. Gulikers, 2006), where the links between formal study, assessment and the real world of professional practice are explicit and clearly foregrounded. Questions about authenticity are, for instance, self-evidently of particular concern in competence-based assessment when the intention is to measure the skills and knowledge against a prescribed professional standard. In these kinds of situations any mismatch between what is taught and assessed in Higher Education and the skills required for the world of work is clearly problematic (Biemans et al., 2004). For instance, if unrealistic and de-contextualized settings are used to assess learning, so that the situations confronting students in assessment are not actually similar to those found embodied in the complexity of most workplaces, then learners’ capacity for professional practice may not be appropriately developed.

However, as Boud and Hawke (2004) point out, the issues surrounding authenticity and competence-based assessment related to professional practice are undoubtedly wider and more challenging. This is largely because of the unintended side-effects of assessment tasks which students see as inauthentic. Boud and Hawke point out, for instance, that whilst some competence-based assessment tasks might well serve the purpose of validating particular skills and competences, they might actually also unintentionally neglect, or even militate against, others: most specifically, those that are useful for the longer term beyond graduation. For example:

• Assessment tasks might emphasize problem solution rather than problem formulation. However, professional practice and life in a complex and ever-changing world typically requires graduates to work in ill-defined areas of knowledge or constantly changing contexts, so needs people who can recognize and identify problems as situations shift, rather than people who only know how to work to specific and rigid rules.

• Learners might become encouraged to look to others (their assessors) to make judgements rather than developing their own ability to judge their own learning outcomes. This can be perceived as a problem because, if this is the case, learners do not develop the evaluative independence required of future work and life situations.

• Assessment tasks in universities often place a premium on individual achievement, thereby inadvertently implying that all collaboration is cheating. This might undermine learners in developing the capacity to work cooperatively. However, the ability to work effectively with and for others is a vital attribute in many ‘real-life’ scenarios (Bowden et al., 2000).

These, and other related issues have more general application to a range of university courses than might at first be supposed, across the whole spectrum, including students studying academic disciplines and not only those studying on professional programmes In all cases it is important whether students believe the assessment tasks being set on their university courses are authentic and realistic, or inauthentic, artificial and relatively meaningless beyond the immediate context of being tested and gaining marks.

To address these sorts of issues, researchers often suggest there is a need to re-engineer university assessment tasks with questions of authenticity firmly in mind. It is important, though, to recognize they are not advocating the total abandonment of competency standards or competency assessment. Nor are they asserting that certification is unimportant. Instead, they urge lecturers to augment their current assessment practices in order to develop more authentic approaches which will support the processes of learning that students need beyond the point of graduation. Boud (2000) calls this ‘sustainable assessment’, which he defines as ‘assessment that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of students to meet their own future learning needs’ (151).

This all means that, as far as possible, we must try to design assessment to foster the kinds of attitudes and dispositions, as well as the knowledge and skills, which learners need for the variety of situations they will be confronted with throughout their lives. So, from this viewpoint, authentic assessment might usefully be viewed as a matter of offering students opportunities which clearly signal to them the value and importance of developing as learners. In fact, Boud et al. (2010) argue that the first question we should actually ask of our assessment practice is: ‘Does assessment do what we want it to do in terms of promoting the kinds of learning that are desired for the longer term?’ This chapter argues that it is vital to think deeply about this question and consider how far assessment helps or hinders the promotion of a range of graduate attributes. This might mean, for example, designing assessment experiences which actively support the development of attributes which include but also go beyond the disciplinary expertise, content or technical knowledge that has traditionally formed the core of most university courses (Barrie, 2007).

Finally, assessment is arguably most productive in terms of promoting genuine, valued learning if it fosters individuals’ own interests and concerns. There is a world of difference between students feeling they are doing an assessment because they are required to slavishly conduct an activity for the sole reason that their teachers require it, and one in which they feel a sense of ownership and responsibility. Assessments which feel meaningful and authentic in these sorts of ways can support high levels of motivation and improved educational outcomes, rather than assessments in which students feel that everyone's response must look the same and that require a routine, formulaic approach. Indeed, Davison's research (2011), which explored authenticity in the context of AfL as part of our CETL research programme, indicated that it was important for learning to become linked to students’ personal interests or issues that the individual had identified for themselves. Furthermore, according to Nicol (2009a) a sense of personal involvement might also be linked to a student's capacity to choose, say, some elements of the topic studied and the method of assessment. This kind of ownership is most often found at undergraduate level in relation to the honours dissertation but we suggest that it can also infuse earlier stages of degree study.

In summary, AfL, then, places considerable importance on explicitly creating assessment environments which encourage students to engage in meaningful, worthwhile learning experiences. The issues that this chapter addresses, then, are about ways in which we can design assessment to promote student engagement by trying to offer authentic learning and assessment experiences.

Putting it into practice

There are many ways in which academic teachers have tried to make assessment feel more worthwhile and meaningful to students. They may try to develop the ways in which students see and experience the assessment tasks themselves. This might be done explicitly to challenge students’ preconceptions about assessment: encouraging them to move away from simply reproducing knowledge. One way of doing this is to develop assessment tasks that overtly make clear the requirement to engage in ...

Table of contents

• Fornt Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Content
• Author biographies
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Designing authentic assessment
• 2 Balancing summative and formative assess
• 3 Creating opportunities for practice and rehea
• 4 Designing formal feedback to improve lear
• 5 Designing opportunities for informal feed
• 6 Developing students as self-assessors and effective lifelong lear
• An Assessment for Learning manifesto
• References
• Index