Contention: assessment is the most important thing we do for HE students

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Contention assessment is the most important
thing we do for HE students

• Sally Brown
• Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of HE Diversity
  in Learning and Teaching
• Leeds Metropolitan University
• Perspectives on assessment
• 20-21 February 2006

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My contention

• How we go about assessing students can make a
  significant impact on how well they achieve in
  their studies
• Poor assessment design will lead students into
  behaviours that are counter-productive to
  learning
• Nothing we do for students is more important than
  getting assessment design right
• Our roles as teachers thereby needs to change
  radically, with less focus on imparting knowledge
  and more focus on supporting learning through
  assessment.

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Good assessment process and practice shape
learning

• Boud (1995) argues that
• 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.
• He also argues
• Students can escape bad teaching, they cant
  escape bad assessment.

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Assessment can influence what students do

• Assessment defines what students regard as
  important, how they spend their time and how they
  come to see themselves as students and then as
  graduates.
• Students take their cues from what is assessed
  rather than from what lecturers assert is
  important. (Brown G, Bull J and Pendlebury,
  M1997 p7)

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If so, we need to re-engineer the curriculum to
focus more energy on assessment

• Student learning does not depend exclusively on
  being taught by us
• Information can be accessed from a wide range of
  sources, including e-materials
• Our role is to help them to learn how to access,
  evaluate and use information (whereas we normally
  focus too much on delivering and testing
  recollection)
• Formative assessment must be central to our
  re-engineered. We dont do enough of it now we
  must constructively align (Biggs 2003)

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Formative assessment helps students learn the
rules of the game

• The indispensable conditions for improvement are
  that the student comes to hold a concept of
  quality roughly similar to that held by the
  teacher, is able to monitor continuously the
  quality of what is being produced during the act
  of production itself, and has a repertoire of
  alternative moves or strategies from which to
  draw at any given point.
• In other words, students have to be able to judge
  the quality of what they are producing and be
  able to regulate what they are doing during the
  doing of it. (Sadler 1989). (my italics)

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What can institutions do? We can

• Have a robust assessment strategy that
  reinforces its integration with learning
• Radically review our assessment regulations to
  ensure they dont make us do stupid things
• Support (require?) staff to use innovative
  approaches to assessment that reduce drudgery and
  concentrate on productive activity for staff and
  students
• Keep asking about our assessment practices why,
  how, what, when and where?

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What can we do as individuals?

• Set small early assessed tasks (formative or
  summative)
• Turn assignments round fast in the crucial first
  semester
• Monitor student attendance and take action when
  students disappear and particularly when work is
  not handed in
• Make more time available for feedback
• Do what we can to personalise the assessment
  experience.

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What else?

• Explore further the uses of computer-assisted
  assessment (both formative and summative)
• Plan to maximise the impact of feedback by making
  students do something with it
• Consider how to give them instant feedback
  immediately after submission of work

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And.

• Help them to understand better what is required
  when reading for different purposes
• Help them to get inside different academic
  discourses when writing
• Stop marking start assessing!

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Useful references

• Boud, D (1995) Enhancing learning through
  self-assessment London, Routledge Falmer.
• Sadler, D R (1989) Formative assessment and the
  design of instructional systems Instructional
  Science 18, 119-144.
• Yorke M, 1999, Leaving Early Undergraduate
  Non-Completion in Higher Education, London,
  Taylor and Francis.
• Yorke M and Longden B, 2004, Retention and
  Student Success in Higher Education, Maidenhead,
  Open University Press